Now it's official:
I accepted that cover art in mp3 is ... crap. I'd like to remove 'em from my music but I have about 500 albums to change...
The challange is, that I'd like to save the cover art before removing it so foo_looks can work with it!
Who could create a batch operation that performs the following:

- find cover art
- copy it to the folder containing the mp3
- give it a predefined name
- remove it from mp3

As far as I know that's not possible for the Foobar Masstagger to do so, is it?

Who is able to solve that task?


JD

You can use TGF to do it easilly.

thx I'll try that!

JD

@jtclipper:

any way to choose the name (for example: front_ico.jpg) so I don't have a file for each song but one for the whole album/folder??

JD

I would also like to remove the cover art from mp3s.
What is TGF?

The GodFather, a tagging tool.
You may find it here.
It's quite bulked. You find all the functions you need but my personal experience: I found simpler ones. Still it's the most complete I've seen so far!


JD

I use mp3 tag tools-It's free!

It doesn't have a fancy interface but does the job well.

Hey, while we are on the subject, is there a tool that allows you filter files using regular expressions on ID3v2 tag fields?

For example, for compilation box sets I write the ID3v2 year tag as the start year to the end year of the compilation like, 19XX-19XX.

Now if I want to re-write those year tags so that it represents original release date (19XX) of the box set, I would have to do a regular expression search on '-', of the ID3v2 year field, of all the mp3 files in my archive and re-write the year tags of the matching files with the original release date of the album.

No at this time , but you can check 'use the file's folder' option and the 'save as folder.*' so all of your pictures are named folder.jpg in each folder album.



TGF can do that also just use a filter on the year field like so : ????-????

think the save as folder.* option might be enough for me thx!

JD

now I see another problem:
TGF doesn't delete the space (what was the name) which was used by the pic!

JD

//edit: padding!!!

Can somebody explain why adding cover art to mp3 is bad?.

I have used tag&rename to add cover art to some of my music and AMG comments, im using id31 & id3v2 for tagging so i can read tags in my iriver mp3 player, (it doesnt support apev2)

Yes because it preserves padding values that are larger and does not shrink otherwise full re write ( slow! ) of the file would be necessary.

A few more users 'complained' about that so I will introduce another procedure in the batch jobs 'Reset padding' to shrink, grow or do both according to the option of padding used in the program.

Great!!!
If it wouldn't remove the padding there wouldn't be much of a reason to delete the art!
Your are a VERY FAST replier! Thanx for your dedication!


JD

I'm not absolutely sure about that but if I recall correctly there were a few reasons:

1. ID3v2 is supposed to suck because it's not good implemented and it's located at the end of the music track like this:
ID3v1 data - music stream - ID3v2 data

2. If you put album art in there you have a "huge" data block at the end of the file. That MIGHT cause the program to have difficulties with gapless playing or whatever. And definitely: If you have a big database of music - it makes it slightly bigger. Plus: The whole track has to be rewritten (possible data destruction) when resizing the "padding" of ID3v2.

3. the purists say: "What the hell is doing meta data in a music stream anyways - can't be good at all...it's f***ing music maaaan?!"

4. My reasons are
a) Foobar can recognize jpg's located in the folder (with the right component installed) so why saving many copies of the pic as metadata.
b) It's 1 or 2 more steps to be done when you tag your music (time consuming).
c) Might be the cause that my Discman doesn't read some of my music (actually I doubt that!)

BUT I wonder: Why the hell don't the developers of ID3v2 put the damn data straight behind the v1 ? that would be much more logic!

Hope my description was correct!

JD

When I scan my mp3s with Encspot, virtually all of them have padding, but none of them have pictures. Is this padding good or bad?

It depends.

If you want to squeeze as many of those files in a portable player then too much padding could make you lose some space that could be used by 1-2 more files.

If you plan to change the tags on that files it is good because the update will be very fast with minimal disk usage as long as the new tag is smaller than the old tag + padding.

Most programs let you specify the amount of padding so you better take care of that as well before you go on and create new mp3 files. I would recommend 256 or 512 bytes of padding to have the best of both worlds.

Thank You!