Print

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

[stricko]

Hi there. I'm looking for some guidance on the storage of Cover Art on audio files. I've read the wiki page and some of the old threads on the subject but I'm more confused than when I started. I've not tried any of the location options so I guess Im using whatever default setting MC was set up with. The default seems to work perfectly well with the standard Artist/Album file structures, but I'm looking to support cover art for "singles", and its here that Im getting confused.

To explain, what Im calling a single can exist in several places, as an album track for the specific Artist, as an album track on a Various Artists compiliation, as a track within a bucket folder for individual tracks I've acquired from all over the place (I treat these as a compilation album, with Various Artists as Album Artist, and a consistent Album Name, but there may be hundreds of tracks).

The problem occurs when adding cover art to individual tracks in the compilation albums (and bucket folders). Sometimes this works fine, sometimes the artwork for a single track becomes the artwork for a whole folder, or other tracks.       

So does anyone have any recommendations for what options to use to better achieve what I'm trying to do?

[HPBEME]

Album/cover art can be applied to individual tracks or an entire album (or multiple albums for that matter)... It all depends on what is selected selected in MC when you paste the desired cover art.

- Selecting the album thumbnail in a thumbnail view will apply a pasted image to all tracks
- Selecting a single track applies only to that track
- Selecting specific tracks applies only to those specific tracks

NOTE:  If a track exists in multiple locations as independent audio files (even if identical), cover art does not automatically get distributed to them - you can apply cover art to each independently as noted above.  Thus you can have different album art for the same track if that same audio file is stored in multiple locations.  Just be aware that if you later apply an image to an album thumbnail where you previously applied an image to a single track, it will be overwritten by the album level thumbnail (and vice-versa).

When you mentioned MC's "default" storage option, I assume you mean storing cover art in each artist and/or album folder? If so, I personally find it far more convenient to store all cover art in a single folder. Users can specify the exact location via Options/File Location/Cover Art/Folder.  With this approach, the cover art file is automatically named artist-album. The "default" approach results in all cover art being named exactly the same... Folder.jpg.  Making it impossible to search for a cover art image directly (the user can of course manually rename folder.jpg to whatever they would like).

Since you did not mention it, you may be unaware you can store the cover art directly in the music file itself. Go to Options/Library & Folders/Manage Library Fields and choose Image File from the left-hand list, and check the box for Save in File Tags (when possible).  Doing this is also "storing" the file, which makes the folder locations effectively a backup of the image embedded into the audio file itself.

In the event it is a concern to you, embedding cover art in the audio file as a tag will make the file bigger.  I use 1000x1000px or larger compressed images for my cover art which are typically < 300 kB each. This comes to approximately 3mb total for a 10 track Flac album. To me, that is trivial considering and album is typically 250mb or more, but for some this is not desirable.