Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[schwaa]

I was hoping people could post some pros and cons of saving album art inside files or just refer to them from the database.  It seems there are conflicting views on this...
Does it affect transfers to Handhelds, make files less stable, experiences organizing art externally, dramatically increase file size, etc.?

[nila]

• As far as I know handhelds will still work fine if the cover art is inside HOWEVER you will get less mp3's onto the handheld as the cover art will be inside the mp3 and will get put onto the handheld too taking up some of that valuable space.
  
• I THINK the files are just as stable although I'm not too sure. I know that the AV2 plug-in for MJ doesn't like internal cover art and I think it makes reading of cover art a lot slower for programs as they have to extract the cover art from inside each file.
  
• To organise it externally you usually either just put the art in the same folder as the album which I think is probably the most common way of doing it or else you put all your covers into one directory and name the covers something like:  Album Artist - Album Name.jpg
  
• File size over an album is increased if you store it internally as the cover art is repeated for each track in the album so if you have say 10 tracks you'll have 10 copies of the cover art instead of 1 (1 inside each of the 10 tracks). This results in more space being used overall.
  
  
  
• Internal cover art makes the individual mp3's more complete as they have all the info self contained. It can however slow down reading of the cover art for some programs and takes up more space.
  
• External cover art means the art can easily become seperated from the mp3's but it can also be edited more easily, is easier and faster for programs to read and takes up less space.
  
  
  I personally use external. I know others here use internal - its up to you.

[Tolga]

I have briefly tried to insert cover art into files. I couldn't play some of these files in my RioVolt 250. In general, I would not insert large data in mp3 files.

I like putting cover art in the directories of the files. There are new tools (image tool bar) which make linking / removing such files very easy, if each folder contains a single cover art, you can do it automatically.