Hi everyone.

I have a question that i hope someone out there can answer for me...

Are there any known problems caused by the size of the artwork embedded within an mp3 file?

Here is the situation: I have been encoding MP3's for a while using --alt-preset standard and embedding artwork @ around 221 pixels square. Recently i started using larger artwork to embed (around 600 pixels square) and one of my friends attempted to play one of these more recent files on their MP3 player and it wouldn't work?

As the only thing i have changed is the size of the artwork, i wonder if this could be the problem?? The older files work fine (with smaller art). They all work fine on programs such as WINAMP and Windows Media. Seems to only be affecting portable MP3 players.

Thanks,
Spageddy.

probably yes. It is not a very good idea to embed artwork in id3 tags especially for portables that may not have a good id3 implementation.

if i were you i would drop this practice, but that's just me...

Or just get portable MP3 players that actually work properly. The iPod is notable in this respect as it skips over any artwork in the tag, regardless of size.

I tend to use 300x300 artwork in the ID3 tag myself. It's good enough for displaying on the screen while generally small enough to not cause too much inflation. 20K is the average size of my artwork, in general.

What strikes me as a bad idea is relying on filename or filepath information to associate album artwork with the actual album that it's artwork for. Putting it in the tag just makes a lot more sense, as I see it.

I don't see it that way. As long as you keep it in the same folder as the mp3 files you should have no problem.... This seems to make much more sense IMO since you keep just one file for album without having to embed it in each file creating unnecessary redundacy.

I never had a problem using it this way, but let's not drag this thread offtopic...

Until you use a mass renamer to reorganize your files based on the tags, and the album art doesn't come with it...


Disk space is cheap and only getting cheaper.


Bah. Fine.

eddiespageddy: Yes, some MP3 players, especially portable ones, can't properly deal with ID3 tags. This applies to tags of all sorts, and players of all sorts. I know of MP3 players that will not properly play songs when they have APE tags, for example. Stuff like that.

There is no fix for this except to not use those players or to not use those tags. Some people prefer to go one way, some prefer the other. Make your own call.

Putting it in the tag does make sense. But what happens if one uses a player hardware or software that doesn't behave (as one would like it to ).
foobar assiduously removes the artwork after one applies replaygain or any other tag modification. AFAIK artwork in the ID3 tag is a hack, and not a proper implementation of the standard.
What i do is put a 500X500 cover in the album folder named as folder.jpg. Shows up as thumbnail in explorer as well, even if you have other pictures in the folder. Disabling thumbnail cache helps, otherwise you end up with lots of .db and .ini files in Windoze.

Nope, it's in the standard.
See http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0.html#sec4.15.
Or section 4.14 in here: http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt


Putting the artwork in the ID3 tag properly also lets explorer show the artwork, at least on my machine. WMP10 also reads artwork from the ID3 tag and shows it, if you have the "Album Art" visualization enabled.

Thanks for the correction otto, and the link to the documentation. I really don't understand why some players fail to follow standards, and I implicate foobar2000 among the culprits. But I am going OT.
As for the picture size to be embedded, 30 kb is supposed to be the reasonable good upper limit of the file size. But as I said, I have stopped doing this as I use foobar2000 extensilvely.