I noticed that MP3Tag "repacks" a FLAC or MP3 file when embedding a image file. It takes a very long time to do this since all FLACs will be repacked. Is there any way (eg. command line) to not repack the files and add cover art inside it?

MP3Tag is strange... after you added a cover art, when you remove that cover and add a new one, it will write pretty quick....

With flac, metadata comes first. If you're using ID3 with mp3 and want to add artwork, you must use v2 which again goes at the beginning. So if there is no room, the entire file must be rewritten. I seriously doubt it does anything with the audio data.

i know it doesn't do anything to audio... it's lossless...
but adding the art is a pain, coz it takes real long....

It's using FLAC ID3v2

I was trying to figure out what you meant by "repack". If anything, it's doing just the opposite; the file is rewritten because there is not enough slack at the beginning. When you remove the artwork the slack is left behind, so adding it back again doesn't require a rewrite.

Flac metadata is stored in Vorbis tags, not ID3, BTW. At least that is the correct implementation and I'm sure Mp3tag is doing this correctly.

it's not saying it's using Vorbis tags... anyway
what is the command line to embed cover art to FLACS

Josh has said numerous times on this forum that using id3 with flac is a "no-no".

If mp3tag used id3 I'm certain it wouldn't have been referenced in the flac website.

For more reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis_comment

http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_...s_metaflac.html
http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_tools_flac.html

Embedding album art is mostly about your HDD speed.

If you keep your music files on a fast HDD, you'll gain significant time.

If you (like I do) keep your music collection on external USB2 drives, you'd better let it run overnight. At the moment, I'm thinking about switching to eSATA ...

http://flac.sourceforge.net/faq.html#tools__long_meta_edits

My advise is to add extra padding when encoding the FLAC's.

Why do you want to add the album art to the individual files anyway?

MP3Tag shows some tags as [ FLAC ID3v2 ] and other tags (the majority) as [ FLAC (FLAC) ]

I don't see anything here in MP3Tags referring to Vorbis tag.

How come do I remove the ID3v2 tag from the FLAC file? These were certainly added by EAC ripping. I just want to let all displaying FLAC (FLAC) which I assume is "the actual" Vorbis tag. Edit: A simple transcode will do in foobar2000...



because I like the way it is with a compilation of music in the same directory
and also because I am a perfectionist



It says "FLAC (FLAC)" for the standard tag in FLAC files. Is this the Vorbis one?

FLAC tags are the same as Vorbis comments

oh good then

Mp3tag only writes FLAC tags (Vorbis Comments) to FLAC files. Existing padding will be used when writing cover art to the files (which makes things faster).

Maybe this is offtopic, but why didn't anyone invent a filesystem supporting the growing of files at the beginning? It would be really great for such uses!

Ok, so it's better to add padding at the beggining of new FLAC files... so I just use the additional switch --add-padding-block but what about the size of it? My art is usually up to 300kb.

I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't want to.

How about this:

It virtually guarantees that you see album art regardless of OS or software being used to play the file

I run multiple operating systems and 1-3 media players on each. It seems like every program wants the cover art file in a different location or name. If it's embedded in the file in the first place, there is no other cover art file needed.

I suppose that's why all mp3s from amazonmp3 come with embedded cover art....

300kb. 500 to give you a "cushion" . . .