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[Deivit]

Hi all,

I'm still using MJ8 and will not upgrade to MC9 or MJ9 until it's more stable, but do like to read this MC9 forum to be aware of the new developments.

There is something that makes me feel very curious about and It's the way people store their cover art. I have all my cover art stored inside the files themselves... I thought it was a good idea since it made my files more compatable... I can use other players and the cover art will always be there.

However, I read many threads where people show preference to store the cover arts not inside the files but in folders, and it seems that there are some different ways to do so, such as a central folder or a folder for each album or directory, and so on... even though, by reading those threads, this also seems to be a source of some problems with cover art disappearing or not showing OK, but people keep on thinking that it's better to have cover arts stored separately from the files.

Now, pardon my ignorance but... what are the pros to do so? Is it something related to MC9 itself?... maybe to Windows XP? (I still run Windows ME) ... Why not store the cover art inside the file?

If it's really much better having them separate I probably should think on doing so but... is there an easy way to "convert" my circa 20.000 files to the new scheme, i.e., extracting the images to a folder? Currently all my files are stored in 2 huge directories with no subfolders at all... I use MJ to manage the files and do not see the need to make subfolders since MJ gives me the tools I need to manage them.

I will appreciate very much your suggestions.

Thank you,

[KingSparta]

personaly i don't see why everyone just don't leave the coverart in one place and not put them in each artist folder etc.... it seems like more work to me, then it's somthing to complain about when it does not work.

Mine works fine in the default folder and when ever you want to rescan you can do a local rescan of all files with the files in the default folder and that takes no time at all. when that is done then a user can select the ones without coverart and search the internet.

[Galley]

If you wanna see the album artwork on the folder icon in Windows XP, then you need an image file in each album folder.

[zevele10]

Nila got a point when he said that with art sleeve in each  file instead of in a folder ,you need much more space on your drive .
I got art sleeves from an external program who put them in the file ,you want or no,so i have art sleeve in each files.
Do not have any problem until now

[Autoelph]

Actually, adding art to the file increases the file size very little (depending on your album art scan). If you have an Mp3 that's 5 Megs and you add art that is 50k, you now have a file that is 5.05 Megs, no big deal. As for where to put it, it's totally personal preference. I like them in the file so no matter where the file goes the art is there with it, AND in a central directory as backups.

[zevele10]

Here is what Nila said.
Anyway one of you is wrong concerning size of art sleeves

It's definitely better to have it seperate I think.

Reasons:

If it's inside the file then the file is fully self contained and can function by itself fully stand alone HOWEVER if the image file is: 500kb it means that for an album with 20 tracks you have that same image repeated 20 times so it's taking up 10Mb of space for that album. Having it individually only takes up .5Mb.  

[nila]

Here's the point about storing cover art in the file.

If you want complete files with all the info self contained then it's great. Some programs dont like it as it's slower I believe to read the cover art - I dont think AV2 likes internal cover art too much.

The main reason NOT to store the cover art in the file however is this:

If you want to have a nice high quality copy of the cover art then the file would probably be around 200Kb which is a not bad size. If you have say 15 tracks per album though then this means that you are using 3Mb extra space to save the cover art instead of 0.2Mb.
If you then times this by say 100 albums which is a smallish collection then you are using 300Mb to store the cover art instead of 20Mb which is a BIG difference.

You then get a slightly bigger collection like some of us have - I have 550 Albums roughly.

This would be 1650Mb for my albums which is a LOT.
This could be: 110Mb.

See the difference?
Obviously though this is presuming you use a relatively high quality cover size which I like.

It's mainly a space issue and this especially counts if you have mp3 players etc that you want to transfer the music to - you'd have to remember to remove the images first.

If you leave the art in the same dir as the album then I'd imagine most software could pick it up as MJ now saves 'relative' file paths in the mp3 so all the software should be able to find the covers easily. If you name it right as well, as someone pointed out, XP will also show the cover art as the icon for the folder which is a nice little extra.

Hope this answers your qu thoroughly

[KingSparta]

>> Having it individually only takes up .5Mb.
well not really true

Sample:

if a file is 1 byte how much room does that take up?

depending on the format and OS etc... it may take up 32,000bytes for that 1 byte file

[zevele10]

It's mainly a space issue and this especially counts if you have mp3 players etc that you want to transfer the music to - you'd have to remember to remove the images first

Because your 128 memory would be eat  in no time?
Or because the files would not play?
I have art sleeves in the files. Will check to see if they take room.
Do not know the quality, 80% got from MM supertag, 10% from AMG  and 10%from scan

[nila]

Lucky you having 128 Megs of memory - I only have 32 right now in my player

Using LAME though I managed to drop each track down to lilke 2 megs using VBR mp3's which worked great.

The cover art would be a HUGE waste of this space.

As for the playing issue I'm not sure, this would depend on the player itself. Wouldn't imagine it'd be a problem.

[Autoelph]

Well, you got me. I didn't "do the math", but yes, even a 50k image, album of ten songs is still only half a meg, or 100k image is one meg. I still like it in the file, have yet to have a problem. My Nomad has 192Megs, so again, I might be losing a song with the art in the file, but I can handle that.

Nila, you really think art in the file causes problems with AV2? I have had problems with it, just thought it was buggy with the new builds, though. Maybe it doesn't like it..

[michel]

>> Having it individually only takes up .5Mb.
well not really true

Sample:

if a file is 1 byte how much room does that take up?

depending on the format and OS etc... it may take up 32,000bytes for that 1 byte file

On the other side, in many cases the cover don't increase the real file size, for the same reason...

[nila]

I'm pretty sure Rhino has posted a few messages about internal cover art. It's really slow to read the cover art from the file if I remember and so he didn't want to include it in AV but then did so because some people needed it.

What you should do is use the Tool in AV2 to copy all the artwork. Just create an empty dir somewhere and get AV2 to copy all the artwork to this directory and name it all as: Artist - Album

Then use this as the rule for looking for artwork with AV2 so that it picks up this external cover art.

If you dont mind having 15 instances of the cover for each track you shouldn't mind one more instance


I think you'll find this might fix your bugs with AV2. I rarely have any bugs with it. I LOVE it

[Deivit]

Thank you all very much for your comments.

Nila: As posted in the plug-ins forum, I indeed have problems displaying covert art with AV2 (the images appear blurred or incomplete with horizontal stripes). I'm gonna try your suggestions with a few files and see what happens.

Thanks again.

[nila]

NP - Hope it works