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[DougHamm]

Hi guys,

More and more portables are coming out with colour screens (especially the video players) and the ability to view cover art in .mp3 tags.  In MC11 I tend to have high-quality scans of cover art stored in a central folder, and not embedded in my files.

How about an option in MC11 to automatically create a downsized copy of cover art (100x100?) and embed it during the portable device transfer's post-conversion tag process?  It would also be done even if a straight copy (no conversion) is performed.  Would this play havoc with the synchronization engine?

-Doug

[JimH]

Good idea.

[SteveG]

I will check into this further.

Thanks,


Steve

[SteveG]

Doug,

In MC11 I tend to have high-quality scans of cover art stored in a central folder, and not embedded in my files.

What are the downsides for you in embedding the art in the files?

Steve

[KingSparta]

Who Has A Screen On There Portable

Make And Model?

[LonWar]

there is a RCA, Creative Labs, and I think IRiver?

Not sure on the models though...

[TAFKAFEX]

Not to forget the one and only Archos AV 400.

Have a look at

http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20040706/index.html

[KingSparta]

Nice, I asked this question before but

Does anyone make one that shows Cover Art in a Car MP3 Player?

SteveG:

The Only Disadvantage I See Is I May Smash Up My YuGo

[Alex B]

Doug,

In MC11 I tend to have high-quality scans of cover art stored in a central folder, and not embedded in my files.

What are the downsides for you in embedding the art in the files?

Steve

For me:

1. High quality means e.g. 1000x1000 pixels. That could make a 300 KB jpeg file. For e.g. 1000 albums / 10000 files that means about 3 GB of binary data inside the file tags. When that data is inside music files it will be unnecessarily read from the disk in many occasions.

External art would take 1000 x 300 KB = about 300 MB. (Actually many albums have more than 10 tracks.)

2. Changing external images is easy and safe. There is no need for rewriting internal file tags or new music files backups.

3. It is possible that some players or programs have problems with music files with internal image data. (Depending on file format etc.)

[DougHamm]

Doug,

In MC11 I tend to have high-quality scans of cover art stored in a central folder, and not embedded in my files.

What are the downsides for you in embedding the art in the files?

Steve

For me:

1. High quality means e.g. 1000x1000 pixels. That could make a 300 KB jpeg file. For e.g. 1000 albums / 10000 files that means about 3 GB of binary data inside the file tags. When that data is inside music files it will be unnecessarily read from the disk in many occasions.

External art would take 1000 x 300 KB = about 300 MB. (Actually many albums have more than 10 tracks.)

2. Changing external images is easy and safe. There is no need for rewriting internal file tags or new music files backups.

3. It is possible that some players or programs have problems with music files with internal image data. (Depending on file format etc.)

Precisely.  The relative overhead of 200dpi cover art isn't that bad if embedded in a lossless file, but when you're making MP3's for the road and the cover art takes up more space per song than the music...

-Doug

[dNj]

mc automatically embeds the .jpg for use in your mp3 player.  100x100 is pretty small image size.  I personally find the best image size to be no more than 300x300.  

[KingSparta]

one thing i noticed using difrent picture programs

Mainly Cpic and Paint Shop Pro 8

if you take a 500x500 image in Cpic and reduce it to 100x100 it looks like crap

then if you take the same image with the same settings with Paint Shop Pro And Reduce it to 100x100 it looks very good and you can still read it.

so Quality Counts When Your Resizing to a smaller pic

[Alex B]

"Pro" editors like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro have usually the bicubic interpolation on by default.

http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/colour/bicubic/

[DougHamm]

mc automatically embeds the .jpg for use in your mp3 player.  100x100 is pretty small image size.  I personally find the best image size to be no more than 300x300.  

If your original .mp3 has embedded cover art already then I don't doubt it's kept when transferred; however if you're using external cover art I don't believe this is done (at least JimH and SteveG didn't think so!  )

I agree that 100x100 is small, but I haven't seen any portable colour-screen players with screens bigger than 320x240 and I don't think they do fullscreen art anyway.   HAving said that, the most future-proof method would be to have the resolution customizable.

-Doug