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[joaoranito]

Hi everyone,

I have been using MC for a long time and started using VinylStudio a couple of years ago to record vinyl (300 of them until now, 2000 more to go!).
Although I am a Mac user, most my music files (more than 50k of them) are in FLAC, so I am generating FLAC with VinylStudio.

No problem playing files but embedded cover art does not show in MC24.
All other FLAC files display correctly their cover art in MC24, even generated by different programs.
Even more strange, the VinylStudio FLAC cover art displays correctly in all other programs I tried (from VLC to Kid3, including ffmpeg, that extracts the image with no problem).
To top it off, if I generate ALAC files from VinylStudio, the cover art is displayed correctly in MC24...

This looks like a strange interaction between VinylStudio format for FLAC embedded cover art and MC24 expectations.

I read all I could about this (yabb posts, wiki, etc) and tried to solve it, to no avail.
Since I have more than 55k FLAC files on MC24 that display correctly, and less than 3000 from VinylStudio, I first contacted VinylStudio developer (very kind and interested person, BTW...).
After some mail exchanges with the VS developer, he could not track the issue, and he suggested I tried some help here.
According to him, he is using the standard for image embedding in FLAC, using jpg as the format.
This is a direct quote from his email, which he encouraged me to post here:

"That said, could I ask you to take this up with JRiver please?  I'm
pretty confident we're doing the right thing because we use Josh
Coalson's reference FLAC implementation to generate the files and, as
you say, the artwork shows up elsewhere.

One thing that might throw JRiver is that we put the album art in two
places:

   - in a FLAC_METADATA_TYPE_PICTURE block

   - in a FLAC_METADATA_TYPE_VORBIS_COMMENT block as Vorbis tag
METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE

The reason we do this is that there seems to be no accepted standard as
to which is correct.  It perhaps bloats the files a bit but the size of
the audio data generally dwarfs the size of the artwork so it seemed an
acceptable tradeoff.

The other thing we do is to always put the image in there as a JPEG, but
I don't see why they should object to that."

So...

Any help on this from more experienced users/devs?
Maybe the double block option is the culprit but it's true that VinylStudio FLAC files embedded cover art are indeed displayed everywhere else...

Some more info...
1) I'm running MC 24.0.75 on a Macbook Air with MacOs 10.3.6 (but I had the same problem with other versions of MC and/or MacOS)
2) VinylStudio is on version 10.0.2 (but same thing applies here)
3) On MC24 Tag Info Image Field a blank square appear, with a label "no image", for a problematic FLAC file
4) On Tag Dump it says
# of Pictures : 1
 Type 0 (28287 bytes)
...
METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE = <Too long to display>
5) For a correct FLAC file, the Image section shows the image, the size and the label "inside file"
6) And Tag Dump says
 Type 1 (28534 bytes)

And there is no METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE field...
-----

From the above, it looks like MC24 does not recognize the embedded cover art and "tags" the file with a "no image" (which I can't edit) when importing.
Maybe it's the Type? (0 and not 1)
I tried all the options that appear when clicking on the "no picture" label (tools) but nothing helps (and even if it helped, I would hate to do that more than 3000 times and counting).

I know I can manually add the cover art using MC24 (but its 300 LPs and I am going on ripping them and will keep on using VinylStudio, because it works great for all the workflow, including noise elimination).
I know I can generate ALAC (that's what I have been doing...) but I also have a set of tools that don't work well with ALAC and, c'mon, the VS FLAC files do display correctly on all other software...
I know I can extract the image and put it in the folder as a Folder.jpg (changing the MC24 options) but I don't want to have them lying around, embedded cover art is so much more practical.
I know I can extract the images and keep them in a specific folder and have MC24 manage them for me but ditto.

Help, anyone?  ?

Glad to post more info on request or even a VS FLAC file as a sample, to be used by someone that knows what to look for...

Thanks!
joao

[joaoranito]

Hi!

Nothing like posting to make you do some extra work...
I decided to use Kid3 to change some of the values in tags.
There are two Pictures Tags (as the VS developer said), in Kid3 no way to set them apart.
One (let's call it A) has "Cover (front)" as the Type, the other (B) has "Other".
If I change B to "Cover (front)", JRiver now displays the image correctly.

So, it looks like JRiver is looking for a specific field for the Picture AND it can't have the value "Other".
I'll try to solve this with VinylStudio people and report, because maybe other people have the same problem...

But I guess JRiver should be more flexible about this, because all other applications I tried deal with it correctly.

I+ll try to find a place in the forum to post a suggestions for more flexibility, if there is a proper place to do this (and not on this board).

Cheers

[JimH]

You might be able to add a custom tag (case must match) to pick up the tag from another program.  We try to support tagging standards, but they do change from time to time.