Is it best to forgo embedded album/cover art? Basically, do audiophiles prefer their FLAC files (or even MP3 files, maybe ) to be free of embedded images? I notice that some people here appear to stick an image in the appropriate folder, naming it folder.jpg or cover.jpg, but that only works with certain players I presume. I just wondered if the general consensus was to leave encoded files as raw as possible or is embedded artwork considered an authentic part of the final file?

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djp

Not because of "leaving the audio file as raw as possible". There's no problem in having metadata. Maybe the audiophiles fear bad emissions by metadata bytes Or other bullshit...

First I embedded album art, but now I avoid it, due to support issues and such. E.g. fb2k can only display one embedded album art image. Also, it cannot embed stuff by itself.
Also, when I need information/statistics about existing album art of the whole media library, I can only do this via a file manager. This of doesn't find embedded art naturally.

You have my NO.

As long as whatever player you are using can play back the stream with choking on the album art there's no problem.

I use it with no problems across iPod/iTunes/winamp/foobar2000

I use mp3tag to embed it in my mp3s/mp4s

I use embedded album art (with MP3 files) only because my DAP can show it, but I also have a jpg file in each album folder in better quality.

I use ImageMagick to resize the picture to 150x150 and it's rarely more than 10kb, great because space is an issue on portable players.

Because most of my mp3 files are in albums and in their own folder for that album, I mainly use the folder.jpg in the album's folder.

However, I embed album art in files that are not in a folder with other songs from their own album - for example, I have folders such as
My Music/U2/others/
and
My Music/_single songs/
for miscellaneous songs from U2 (and of course I also do this for other artists) and for random songs from artists for whom I don't have any full albums.

I won't embed album art and also have a folder.jpg file because foobar2000 won't display the image if there are multiple images that apply.

I also use mp3tag to embed album art in mp3 files (or remove album art in some cases).

I use iTunes to organize my music and play in my own computer. The same music is synchronized to the Media Center PC and used in Vista Media Center.

ALL my music have embedded Artwork (at least 300x300 pixels and most are 600x600). I have tools such as Album Art Downloader XUI and iTSfv to ease my tasks. I also make a copy in album folder as Artwork.jpg (this is additional to Folder.jpg for backup purposes).

All my music are completely portable. Vista Media Center has never failed displaying Album Art. I enjoy iTunes Cover Flow, Grid View thanks to my Artwork.



That's my story but I see most of others don't share the same experience as me.

I don't embed any album cover art to my files. I also use only ID3V1.1 TAGs not ID3V2.X ...

I don't understand why I should have the same meta data embedded to every song of an album...
One album art at the album's folder is not enough?

Anyway, there are so many incompatibilities ... car radios, DAPs or other stuff has a problems playing files with ID3V2.X and the embedded cover art.
So I've chosen to have raw files with a simple TAG that everything supports and I don't need to wonder whether the new device will or won't have any problems with playing my files.

I have a pretty simple policy:
- 500x500 folder.jpg
- 1000x1000 cover.png (lossless PNG24) when possible

folder.jpg gets embedded and stays in the folder along with cover.png. folder.jpg is also loaded for iTunes album artwork (my primary player is foobar).

I've had zero issues with embedded album art in FLAC, MP3 and AAC/MP4 files. So, I say YES to embedded artwork.

I use folder.jpg for my albums which are individual mp3s

but for the stuff that I have ripped to FLAC images w/embedded cuesheets I embed the cover art with MP3tag.

It's pretty handy to have everything in one file, IMO.

It is very neat to sport a FLAC file with embedded cover art, with proper tagging information... but let's face it, this task can be *really* tedious... I usually embed art, but I am considering not mixing music and image for purity reasons (that is, I could have all art in one directory source, and music files left alone). For that, I need FB2k to support album art source path available which is not at the moment... I am still thinking... about a pure FLAC... no tag and no art... just pure... %artist%-%tracknumber%-%title%.flac

I have another policy: Just a folder.jpg, back.jpg (and booklet) with as big dimensions as possible. No problem with 3000x3000. Why? Computing power is (or will be soon) huge enough. I don't want album art at the size of a stamp, when standard monitors use 15000x10000 screen resolution

Never used to do it, but I'm a reformed art-embedder, mostly using MP3Tag. Doesn't seem to affect sound quality (sorry - haven't done ABxing to verify this) or increase the file size too much, using 300x300 jpegs. Once you art-tag you don't go back, to paraphrase someone or other...

"Purity?"

Dude, this isn't like you're breeding dogs or something.

I just got done setting an ipod up for a friend of mine who really likes the cover flow feature. The only way I could get iTunes to display artwork for albums where it cannot be downloaded (or was wrong or of low quality) was to embed the images. At least I assume that's what iTunes is doing.

So there's someone else with the same experience. Once I get hardware that has the ability to display artwork I too will have to figure out how to make it work. If it means embedding 500x500 jpg images, then that's what I'll do.

I embed album art in all my FLAC and MP3 files (and I would in my Vorbis files too if I knew of a standardized way of doing it).

I don't see any reason why not to embed it. Adding ~150 KB to a 5 MB MP3 or a 25 MB FLAC is not that large of an increase. I also don't see it as a problem of redundant (and thus unneccessary) information as the ALBUM, ARTIST, REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM tags are all redudant but still placed in every file.

I also have an external (both jpeg and a higher res PNG if possible) but I am not a big fan of the folder.jpg or cover.jpg naming scheme. I would rather have a unique name like "%artist% - %album%.jpg" but media players don't seem to agree with me.

I can't listen to album art. I don't usually even bother. foo_discogs grabs it for me for free while I tag. Beyond that, I don't care enough to waste much of my time at all on it.

Off the subject, but I've gone with a 1000x1000 "standard" primarily because my scanner is garbage Usually, I can remove enough noise to make usable 1kx1k images, but not always.

End Apartheid!

I usually embed the cue and the front cover (500x500 .jpg) into my flacs (they are mostly CD backups), making a separate folder for other scans like back cover etc (~1500x1500 png) as archive.

For my MP3 Player, i embed the front cover (200x200) into my mp3. The size of the jpg ranges from 44 - 80kb and it's not really an issue to me.

For a small collection, it's neat to have embed art...
When you have a vast catalogue and think about tagging and embedding over 2000 files, specially if you are scanning/grabbing all art at a minimum least resolution of 500x500... the task can be daunting. It would be easier to have all music separated from the art, because let me tell you, it's not all art you find in 500x500...

Neither the embedded album art nor the hard disks master boot record will be interpreted as audio material (-> played back) by your playback software, you can be sure. Lets stop this tech clueless audiophiles crude ideas here.

Hear, hear!

I see no need to search for the cover arts - i have my originals and my scanner. The only case where you need to search for it is when you lost your original (happens pretty rarely) or when you got your music.... elsewhere

I agree that it's a huge task to scan and embed everything, but you're doing it only once. For me, doing this is worth it.... for others it may not.

Pretty much everything supports ID3V2.3 nowadays, just don't use UTF-16 or UTF-8. Using V1.1 is a bit odd, half my track titles would be cut off as well as album names and artist names.

For the record, I think it's less of a huge task to search online for album art than it is to scan the cover art to each CD you have. Using Album Art Downloader, Amazon and Google Images, it's easy to find 500x500 art for most cd's - and for the ones you can't, then you can pull out the scanner. Still takes a lot of time, but I think less than scanning each CD liner individually.

Not everyone owns a scanner; not everyone wants to own a scanner.

I have a scanner and I still don't like to scan my cover art. I would rather spend 1 second looking up a 500X500 cover art picture than 5 minutes getting an album out and scanning the cover.

On a side note, I embed all of my album art. That is the only way for my iPod touch, Zune, Creative Zen, PSP, and PS3 to display it. Otherwise I would have to have iTunes look up the album art, the Zune software look up the album art, not have album art on my Zen, and manually associate the album art with a picture on both my PSP and PS3. The process of embedding the album art in 10,000+ songs is nothing compared to the time it would take to do all of those other methods.

I don't really care about cover art. It's just the music that matters.

Album art, to me, is part of the overall music-listening experience. It's cool to instantly browse to an album by view, instead of just text.

I embed all artwork; the storage usage equates to about 1 additional song per album, which isn't that much. I use only 600x600 album art -- that is the ideal size IMO. When I can't find the art, I just leave it blank and keep looking.

iTunes' "Get Album Artwork" has been a big help, but lately I've been getting all my art from AlbumArtExchange.com.

Why?! That doesn't make any sense!!!!

As for album art I use it because my iPod can display it. When iTunes doesn't have one for download I look for them in Google Images. There is no need for scanning them in 99% of the cases (and I don't bother scanning the last 1%.)

The aforementioned group must be those who own standard monitors with such miraculous resolution.

:lol:

I don't mean to quote an old post but I didn't see this one earlier when I made my first reply. iTunes is not embedding the album art in tracks where it obtains the art from the iTunes Store. Instead, iTunes is storing an uncompressed image (normally 600X600) in another directory and then just associating that picture with all the songs in that album. That way it isn't embedding 1.5MB pictures with all sorts of audio files. That would cause a drastic increase in file sizes and album sizes. I don't know why iTunes just doesn't settle for ~76k jpeg images instead of using an uncompressed format. I don't think that images as small as 600X600 (let alone displaying these images on 320X240 and 320X480 devices) need to be uncompressed. I found out the hard way that iTunes uses these abnormally large pictures by using a program that looked through iTunes and automatically embedded the artwork it was using. All of the sudden my 160kbps VBR mp3 files went from taking up 4.5MB (for a 3:20 song) to nearly 6MB.

You are right though, you need to embed the album art if iTunes can't download the correct album art or if the album art it downloads is bad.

It would be so fantastic if one could have album art act the way iTunes makes it act when it downloads it from the iTunes Store (referencing one file instead of having multiples). I'm pretty sure it would save me a few gigs of space.

@kornchild2002,

That was surely not the proper way to do embed iTunes artwork. It is supposed to save the Artwork as JPEG first and then embed them. This way an Artwork would hardly be 1.5 MiB in file size.

@ozmosis83,

The purpose of embedding artwork to every file is so that you can create a custom playlist of your songs, copy them to your USB or whatever, and take it somewhere else and still have your artwork. If you only had artwork in one file that referenced to the whole album, then when you take one track out somewhere else, you are most likely not to have the Artwork with the song.

Another case for embedding artwork: performance.

I've noticed that iTunes - specifically Cover Flow - seems to run faster when the images are embedded (as opposed to "linked" as how Get Album Art does it). Linked images seem to always lag while loading a preview, especially when switching the view setting (Song, Album, Artist, etc.)

MCoreD is also right about being able to assemble playlists or file compilations and being able to copy them while maintaining artwork.

I would only resort to scanning covers as a very last resort. To scan a large collection, and properly clean up for use would be time-prohibitive.

Edit: grammar

I could care less about cover art, so I don't embed it, but I don't think that there is any problem with doing so.

I guess I'm one of those people who think "it's better to do it yourself". I just prefer to scan them myself cause then i will be able to control the quality. Most album art i saw on the net is kinda low quality. Of course it also depends on what kind of music you are listening to, it's hard to get HQ scans for some more "exotic" music.

Also, because I'm doing a "full" backup of the music and the art, I like to have things like .. barcode & other stuff to match my physical copy

True, although i don't really understand why someone would not want to own a scanner... unless it's a money issue.

Embedded art of at least 300x300 will enhance the soundstage and 7th dimensional tonality of the music.
Anything of lesser quality will adversly effect the bass imaging and likely lead to tinnitus.

I am kidding, of course....

I have tried both and prefer embedding.
It seems like a much "cleaner" way to do it and embedding works better for my portable devices.
I do love album art, for me it is an integral part of the music.

Edit: Humor added.

Who says that iTunes is supposed to operate that way? iTunes pretty much does what it wants regardless of what people think how it is supposed to operate. iTunes has operated this way ever since Apple introduced the feature to download album art from the iTunes Store. I think it uses uncompressed png files but I am not quite sure what format the images are stored in. The only thing I know is that they are uncompressed as they take up between 1-1.5MB and, when I save them as jpeg images, the file sizes are drastically reduced to ~76k.

I would much rather have iTunes operate the way you mentioned but it has never operated that way and it probably never will. For some reason, it Apple thinks that it needs to work only with uncompressed images with many of them looking crappier than compressed jpegs that I could download off of the internet at fraction of the file sizes. A prime example is the All That Remains "Overcome" album. The artwork that iTunes downloaded was washed out and it took up way too much space. I downloaded a jpeg from using a Google image search that looked better and took up less space.

...or a dozen other credible reasons.

As I said, I own a scanner. It is actually a all-in-one Office unit made by HP. I have used the scanning feature about a dozen times since I have owned it. I purchased the unit way back in 2001 as well and it still prints just fine. I just don't scan anything. In fact, I haven't scanned a single album cover. I have only scanned other pictures that were required for homework in some of my early engineering classes. I think it is just easier to go online to find a picture. Now I use my printer's copy feature quite often. But that is is just it acting as a color/black and white photo copier, I don't scan those copied documents.

I have many reasons why I don't use the scanner function of my printer, I also have dozens of reasons why I don't use the fax function of my printer. On top of that, these all-in-one printers are so inexpensive today that many people do in fact own scanners. They would rather just go online and look up the album artwork instead of taking the 5 minutes to find the CD cover, scan it, properly size it, clean it up, and then add it to their music collection.

kornchild2002, my reply was more focused on the program you were mentioning that caused you trouble with greatly increased file sizes. I was saying it was not the proper way to embed artwork using iTunes because the programmer should have known iTunes had uncompressed images. Talking about iTunes itself, yes I agree, uncompressed artwork is an overkill.

I understand. I just thought that I would point out that iTunes never fully operate the way I/we want it to. I want to embed 500X500 (or 600X600) jpeg images while other people like having uncompressed images assigned (not embedded) to each track. That and I don't like those automatic embedding programs that rely on iTunes as they are using uncompressed album art that will drastically (I consider 1.5MB to be drastic) increase the file size. So I was just trying to poke more fun at what I think is a flawed system (iTunes and those other programs).

Out of curiosity, what program was this kornchild2002?