Was wondering when adding cover art to a mp3 file if it recompresses it?

Does it also increase the file?

It will increase the file size, but not recompress it.

is it considered meta data?

your probably better of using a folder.jpg rather than embedding the album art in each mp3 file. this will keep your file sizes smaller as you will not need to have album art for each mp3 file. Simply add the .jpg for the album cover in the folder which contains the music for that album. Most media player will be able to recognize this for album art such as winamp, foobar, and i think itunes. I personally think embedding album art is redundant and overbloats the file size. Just my opinion but some people prefer this though.
I'm not an expert like most on this site so if any info is wrong please correct me.

Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't the ID3v2.3 tag add some padding to each mp3 file? So the file size can increase if album art takes up a certain amount of space or larger. I have embedded album art to all of my mp3 files and a good chunk of them didn't increase in file size. Most of the album art I added was at 300X300 for iPod classic playback and for PS3 playback (the PS3 never displays the album art at anything higher than around 96X96).

Many people have switched to the folder.jpg album art setup but I don't like it. Reason being is that my car CD deck can display album artwork for mp3 and AAC files only if the artwork is embedded, iTunes still has some errors without embedding the artwork (some artwork will show up as a black square on my iPod or some songs show up with completely different artwork), my PS3 reads the artwork of mp3 files only if I embed it (or go through the painfully long process of associating each individual mp3 file with a picture stored on my console's hard drive), and I don't have to worry about copying over the single jpg file if I move my music. Again, I only work with 300X300 artwork as I don't need anything higher. Many people like having 1.5MB 500X500 artwork and the folder.jpg method will work better for that.

Edit: I don't think that iTunes works with the folder.jpg standard. iTunes uses a similar setup when automatically obtaining album artwork though. iTunes will download a 500X500 1.5MB cover (sometimes the file size is smaller and there have been a few instances where the resolution was 300X300) and embed that into a library file. It will then associate that one picture with all the appropriate music file. This is similar to the folder.jpg standard but, as usual, Apple has to do things their way.

thats a good point. I suppose many car audio or home theater systems which a capable of album art won't recognize a folder.jpg. In which case your best option is to embed the album art. Also if you have tons of hard drive spaceto spare it probably is not an issue either.
I am not certain about the ID3 tags adding cushion? I always was under the impression embedding art work increased file size, but I certainly could very well be understanding wrong too.
tim

I am just curious about the file size issue as I have embedded album art numerous times without increasing the size of my mp3 files. I don't know if ID3 adds padding or if it is because of another reason. I thought I remembered reading a thread here on hydrogenaudio detailing that album art (of a certain size) won't increase file size.

I don't believe it's common for ID3V2 to be padded enough to add album art of any reasonable size after the fact without having to re-write the entire file. Padding is usually only a few kB (just 128 bytes in the case of Lame's --pad-id3v2).

Now if you add art and then remove it, the space once containing the art is likely to stay intact, though I guess it depends on the tool you use.

Having album artwork embedded is also handy if you want to send someone a single track and don't necessarily wish to "burden them" with two files. Additionally, embedded artwork is critical for those who lump all their music in one large directory unless they follow a player-specific file naming scheme for the artwork (e.g. Album_cover.jpg).


Anecdotally, when I import album artwork in my LAME-encoded MP3s, I always observe an increase in file size. I use 500x500 JPEGs, when available, between 50k and 125k. Given what greynol said about the default padding size in LAME, that's expected behavior.

If you have various MP3s for which you haven't encoded yourself, you can't always be certain of what settings were used during the encoding process that may have affected the amount of padding. In such cases, you may not be able to guess whether or not embedding artwork will increase the file size unless you view the file in a hex editor (or some other inspector).

Right! I forgot that --pad-id3v2-size "num" (in bytes) had been added as a command line switch.

I stopped using folder.jpg by having it stored in the folder with my mp3s because I have a Sony DVD Recorder, and a Sony DVD Player that both won't allow having jpg and mp3 on the same disc making them useless discs in those units as they'll only see the jpg images with no way to play the mp3s. I now store the album art in the ID3v2 tag, and just 7z the album art so it doesn't cause issues with units/players that don't like a mixture of jpg and mp3 stored on the same disc.

how does the coverart.jpeg method work?


I dont have my music organized my Album folders, more or less organized in a main music library Folders by year kinda

Can I create a folder with all the art and link it that way or must the jpegs be in the same folder as the mp3s?

It's cover.jpg and you just place it in the same folder as the album.

Lots of programs will pick it up and use it for each file in the folder. Various other programs will also allow you to specify a folder where the artwork is kept I think.

How does the program know that is the correct file as opposed to another file?

So since I do not have many folders and every artists is in 1, I can't do the cover.jpg?

You can give a try to MusicBee, it allows you to link every music file to an arbitrary image stored wherever you want with every name you want.

It depends on the player software...

I use Winamp. It looks for a jpeg in the same folder as the MP3 with a filename that matches the album name in the ID3 tag. (It has to match exactly.) I just tried an experiment of copying a few unrelated MP3s into a temp folder along with their associated jpegs. They all displayed the correct image when played.

Another option is to embed the image directly inside the MP3 file (which was the original question in this thread). This will make each file slightly larger and take-up more space overall, since you'll have multiple copies of each image. There are a few "tagging" programs that can embed the artwork. When I did it, I used Media Monkey (FREE!!!).