hi folks,

i've recently begun adding art to my entire collection using automated download tools that get the artwork from amazon.com and the like.

unfortunately, i just now discovered that the amazon downloads are often several times larger than the recommended 20k or so maximum for embedded art.

i would like to continue adding artwork (i don't mind the file bloat; i have a large hard drive, and a good complete music collection is more important to me than space savings) but not if it screws up my batch tagging ability. once i've added artwork to a file, it takes a long time to manipulate the tag (ie add custom descriptions to the comment field and such) because the images are 40k, 50k, even 80k at times and take up all available space in the tag.

obviously, the solution here is to further pad the tag once the image has been added (again, i don't mind the file bloat; i'm using lame v0, after all). are there any tools that will allow me to pad the tags after i've added the image? naturally, those tools need to be savvy enough to know about embedding artwork; i've had bad experiences using tagging tools that don't know about embedded artwork, so they will delete it or corrupt the tag or some such nonsense.

thanks

I use Tag&Rename to manage the tags on my MP3s. You can get it here.

One of the options it offers is for the user to specify how much padding to put into an ID3v2 tag. The upper limit seems to be 100kB. The default mode of operation is for the software to calculate the amount of padding automatically, but there's no information about how it does this and I haven't experimented.

Still, if you're really not bothered about disk space, you could just set it to put in 100kB padding to all your MP3s.