is this even remotely possible? I know that it is with AAC because iTMS tracks have album art integrated in their 128k tracks but is it possible with mp3s, namely those encoded with LAME? I purchased an iPod photo 30GB and i'd like to be able to do this. it's not very important, but it's a nice gizmo for the pupils

It is called id3v2.

You can add any sort of info, but someone says that id3v2 is crappily implemented, and the only real religion is APEv2 tags. They are another kind of tag, introduced my monkey audio, and used in musepack.

As long as I know APEv2 have NO hardware support. Actually I don't own any portable player, so I don't know whether, for instance, an iPod photo would display album art introduced in an id3v2 tag outside iTunes, for instance with TheGodFather (a very good program for tagging, unfortunately only for windows) (by the way, I put here a wish for a foobar2000 port to Mac OS X).

But the album art is in the file, you don't have to bother with separate files, like for instance when you add cover art to wma (i think).

If you use iTunes, you can drag cover ar in the art box and it will be added to the file.

I feel like a douschebag I should've known that it was so easy in iTUNES.

speaking of .... what's the best album art displayer for foobar2000?

I tried Toaster, and I couldn't extract the .RAR (it was corrupt according to WinRAR) ?

IMHO album-art-in-a-tag is a bad idea. First if it is "album" art, it belongs to the album and it doesn't belong to the "song" metadata. Second the tag, whatever, will be big and in the best scenario you'll have your player to do more work to "skip" over it, while in the worst scenario you'll have a noticeable gap between tracks. Third you'll hate it when you would like to print the album art, include it in another document, send it to a friend or whatever. Put your album art in your "album container", typically the album folder, well organized and following reasonable naming rules.

Sergio

meh , i've scanned an album before and after adding album art to the tags, it only adds about 0.4 mb to the entire album. I doubt that much extra usage is really going to lag performance on the ipod photo; especially because, it is made to read album art off id3v2 tags

You totaled 400KB for album art in *each* album's song? How many songs? Well.. in any case it must not be hi-res album art...

You know, here at HA, many of us are concerned more about audio quality than this kind of things, but of course it is your choice.

Cheers

Sergio

I found a wonderful program called iTUNES Art Importer. it's a synch to use!

it struggles with soundtracks and weird key characters, but for those rare few, i have to manually drag cover art.

its not 400kb for each song in an album. that's roughly how much extra space it uses for all the album's song combined.

ex: before an album folder was 97.9MB
after an album folder was 98.3MB

ya see and no, it's not incredibly high-resolution but it'll suffice for a two inch screen (and i'll clearly be able to make out what the album art looks like)... trust me, its neat!

and these album covers are the blown up ones off of amazon.com server

here's what it looks like (truly, I've seen it in person):