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[wglong]

I have several files that have cover art embedded in them; however, 90% of my library uses the folder.jpg convention.  Is there any easy way to remove the cover art from the mp3's and create folder.jpg's?  I know I could remove art then "search" for art and that would create the folder.jpg... is that the only way?

[Matt]

You can configure whether MC stores images in tags in Options > File Location > Cover Art

In general, we recommend embedded art for any file that supports it.  In general, native tags are better than side-cars.

[wglong]

I guess my only concern with storing the images in the files is why take up more space than needed.  With 18 songs on an album, why duplicate the image 18 times?  And with 1000's of songs, that's more drive space.

[JimH]

Cover art is small.  1000 images would be around 50MB.  1000 tracks would be around 5000MB.  So you're only using about 1% more storage.

50 MB of storage costs around US $0.01 now.  Cover art in 10,000 tracks would cost about $0.10, which is less than the value of your time reading this thread if you make more than $6/hour.

[wglong]

  Thank you for the reply.  I like others waste too much time trying to find the "best" solution around all tech topics.

I just checked out the wiki and found it very educating with links to topics in these forums.  Thanks again.

[MusicHawk]

Not trying to argue, just understand the trade-offs in the ways to store cover art...

As a test, I checked the separate folder where I keep cover art, and found 316.6MB used for 4995 .jpg files, so 1000 images averages 63MB.

Then I checked a sample of music files (all artists starting with "S") and found 26.9GB for 5966 .mpg files, so 1000 tracks averages 4.5GB.

So, in my test sample, image storage is 63/4500 or about 1.4% of music storage. That's fine.

However, most of the images are album covers shared by multiple music files (one image used by every track on an album, and sometimes by even more tracks -- artist photo, for instance). Wouldn't the space devoted to images increase by 10-times or more if there was a separate image for most tracks? This would have a big impact on some libraries (I have 80K tracks and growing, though fewer than half are likely to ever have an associated image.) Is there any MC-side difference in storage space when an image is stored inside a music file vs. separately? (Of course, there's some difference due to how a particular drive allocates space to individual files.)

My biggest concern, and reason for storing images separately, is making sure image files are EXCLUDED from my iPods. I keep running out of space and having a variety of synch problems, even though there should be plenty of space for the number of tracks I synch. After a failure, when I check with iTunes, I discover half the drive is full of images, even though I tried to exclude them from the synch. The only recourse is to reinitialize the drive and resynch which takes 17+ hours. If I was 100% sure images stored IN music files on my desktop would NOT be sent to my iPod, I'd switch to embedded cover art. Am I overlooking something?

[neFAST]

image file
       Imagefile=[]
 Find all files whose image field is empty (files without images). Placing a minus sign – immediately before Imagefile finds all files that do have imges.
       [Imagefile]=.,\
 Finds all tracks with external cover art. Adding – before this expression returns all tracks with cover art stored internally (in the file).

Found that in the help file but it looks like it's not working.
First expression returns my whole music library, second one is empty ?! what am I doing wrong?

[eba]

In general, we recommend embedded art for any file that supports it.  In general, native tags are better than side-cars.

If this is the recommended option, why am I unable to select only store in tags and not also in another folder?  As is I just send cover art to a folder in a dark corner of my hard disk, and then go delete them all when I'm bored.
This can be particularly annoying, however, as I have an 'album' called Single Songs, where I chuck all of my songs that aren't part of any actual album.  Most of these don't have cover art.  If I add cover art to one song, because it puts it in the cover art folder named as '(Multiple Artists) - Single Songs' everything left in the album without cover art ends up getting automatically tagged with it.

[Alex B]

At some stage JRiver decided to add a disk file always when the automatic cover features are used. It is intended to be a backup in case something unfortunate happens to the embedded cover art in the file tags. I suppose they have tried to meet most users' expectations without adding too many options.

Some time ago I was surprised when I noticed that the cover art naming system blindly overwrites an existing cover art file if it happens to have the same name. Previously I thought that it would use the usual Media Center system and add (1), (2), (3) etc to the filename. However I kind of understand why that happens because MC doesn't have a database for the cover art files separately. MC cannot know if the intention is to replace the existing file with a newer file or if other audio files happen to use it. An example of a problem filename could be (Multiple Artists) - Best Of.jpg.

In any case it has always been possible (and still is) to use any file naming scheme for external cover art manually.

To answer the OP's question: An excellent tool for mass extracting embedded cover art to folder.jpg files is Mp3tag. It is a free tagger that supports nicely MC's MP3 tagging system (its ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 tagging mode provides the best compatibilty with MC if Unicode characters are not needed).

[craft]

null

[Alex B]

I've never understood how MC decides when to have a copy of the cover art in the 'Cover Art File Location',

It doesn't decide. It always saves an external file too when a cover art file is added to audio file's tag.

but is there an option to backup all cover arts in a specific folder, rather than in the same folder as the files as folder.jpg?

 ?  There are three different name & location options, the default is "in a specific folder".

( It is not possible to save a Folder.jpg file in a specific folder, if you mean that. It would always overwrite the same Folder.jpg file.  )

[craft]

null

[MusicHawk]

It happened again -- lots of cover art on my iPod, in spite of doing what I understand will prevent this. So, the iPod can contain only a small fraction of the desired playlist because so much space is in cover art. And, apparently there's no way to remove the images except by reinitializing the iPod -- aka, starting over, which takes almost a full day.

What is the secret of preventing MC from putting cover art on an iPod?

[hit_ny]

What is the secret of preventing MC from putting cover art on an iPod?

Are you saying that..

-  if you create a playlist to sync to the iPod, of files that do not contain album art embedded inside them that

- MC is *still* grabbing cover art associated with these files and putting it on the iPod ?

even if said art is in a common art folder or in each album folder itself

[MusicHawk]

My music files do NOT intentionally contain embedded images. I did not put any in, but I suspect some have it, added when doing Internet lookups. "Just in case", I have tried to remove it from ALL music files, but haven't found a reliable way to do so. So, maybe some still have embedded images.

And, when I synch with the iPod, I choose every setting that seems to tell it to not use/include/transfer images. But somehow, many music tracks on the iPod end up with images -- so many that iTunes tells me that half the iPod space is used by images.

Because of the problem with embedded images getting sent to the iPod no matter what, I long-ago chose to store images separately, in a specified single Cover Art folder (not an album folder; I don't use album-named folders). This is one-folder-for-all system is difficult to manage because of how MC names pasted-in images, which overwrite previous images, but that's a different (very annoying) problem than the iPod mystery.

So, I need a rock-solid way to keep images off the iPod, no matter HOW they are stored in MC. OR, if one MC image method causes them to also get on the iPod, I need to know which method does NOT. I've tried many experiments without discovering either of these -- and they are painful experiments due to the time involved.

For instance, is it simply not workable to NOT use album folders? Or, is there some way to for-sure get the embedded images removed? Or, is there some benefit to using embedded images (always seemed like a bad option to me).