[tavilach]

Ahh!

Check out the album artwork on the new free song, "Pavement Cracks" by Annie Lennox...

It's 600x600 pixels!

I'm so very confused...

I thought all iTMS songs were 300x300 pixels, and all the album artwork I have added has been 300x300 pixels. Are they starting to use 600x600? I may have to start using WalMart's 500x500 pixel images...but I didn't think it was worth it to have artwork that wasn't the default size, only to waste memory...I like consistency, too.

Hrm.

Furthermore, I have a wishlist playlist, to add the 30 second iTMS clips that I plan to buy...

...and there are some consistency issues here, as well. About 60% of my clips' album artwork just says "Artwork Available on Purchase." It would be better to include the miniature version of the artwork, includes on the iTMS, but whatever. Then, 40% of my clip have the complete album artwork! These are from albums I have never even laid eyes on, so it's not as if they are taking the artwork from other songs. I'm actually getting the album artwork, the complete album artwork, for free! Contrary to what you might think, this isn't even the case with the songs from albums I've already downloaded from! Many of those still say "Artwork Available on Purchase"...but these random bunch of clips (about 40% of the total, I'd guess) have the full album artwork!

What's even weirder is that when I "Get [the] Info" of the songs with the complete album artwork, and go to "Summary," it says "Artwork Available on Purchase."

Umm...

One more weird thing: I could have sworn that when I added these songs to my wishlist playlist, none of them had album artwork. Then, when I checked again, it seemed that very few had it. Now it's almost half! Either I'm imagining things (I could very well be), or something's up...

What the heck is going on, here?

Try adding the following songs to a wishlist playlist:

If I Am - Nine Days
Control - Puddle of Mudd
Clocks - Coldplay
Don't Turn Around - Ace of Base

There are plenty more where that came from, but look...they all have album artwork! Check it out yourselves...

...and then there's "Don't Tell Me" by Avril Lavigne. It has 70x70 pixel album artwork...

That is all.

[Krypton]

You seem to have a fairly trouble free life if this is what is bothering you the most

You could always strip the huge artwork and add a scaled down version no?

[tavilach]

Originally posted by Krypton:
You seem to have a fairly trouble free life if this is what is bothering you the most

You could always strip the huge artwork and add a scaled down version no?

Yeah, well, second semester senior...what can you do .

[mitchell_pgh]

I don't think there is a "default size"...

I've been using Amazon for cover art... I'm a little upset with their quality especially older CDs. They also don't conform to a uniform size...

I'll try Wal-Mart.

[mdc]

maybe apple upped the size of the artwork because they included printing covers into itunes 4.5 and maybe the default 300x300 did not look so good as a cover?

just my 2c

[wataru]

I've found the album art size to be hugely variable by album. Perhaps it's not Apple that decides.

[tavilach]

Originally posted by mdc:
maybe apple upped the size of the artwork because they included printing covers into itunes 4.5 and maybe the default 300x300 did not look so good as a cover?

just my 2c

Naw. Their newest free song is still 300x300.

[OwlBoy]

Well, this annie lenox song's cover... is it really a cover? or just an image?

-Owl

[tavilach]

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
Well, this annie lenox song's cover... is it really a cover? or just an image?

-Owl

I'm not sure, but the Counting Crows cover is also 600x600!

I've just shrunk the two to 300x300. If I notice a new pattern, I won't shrink them anymore.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by tavilach:
Yeah, well, second semester senior...what can you do .

Apparently not IB testing or college stuff if you've got time to worry about this

<edit> unless, of course, that's second semester senior in college. </edit>

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
Apparently not IB testing or college stuff if you've got time to worry about this

<edit> unless, of course, that's second semester senior in college. </edit>

The thing is, you would think Apple of all people would be very consistent about this. One, maybe two sizes at most. Ideal and acceptable, but they seem to put whatever they can find in their files.

Resizing artwork is a crazy waste of time.

[starman]

And this matters..why?

Mike

[mishap]

Originally posted by starman:
And this matters..why?

Mike

exactly.

[MrBS]

It wouldn't be an issue except for how they decided to include the artwork. It seems it would have made a lot more sense to keep it in a centralized place and have itunes check for it when you look at a song... as opposed to keeping a huge pic embedded in each music file.

Haven't tested it myself, but is someone walking around with an iPod mini carrying 500 copies of a 600x600 piece of album art they can't even access? Seems like bad design.

~BS

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by MrBS:
It wouldn't be an issue except for how they decided to include the artwork. It seems it would have made a lot more sense to keep it in a centralized place and have itunes check for it when you look at a song... as opposed to keeping a huge pic embedded in each music file.

Haven't tested it myself, but is someone walking around with an iPod mini carrying 500 copies of a 600x600 piece of album art they can't even access? Seems like bad design.

~BS

I wouldn't classify these images as "huge". And I actually prefer the cover art to be embedded in the files. It makes transferring your music files that much easier.

I would be interested to see a comparison of someone's music collection size (in megabytes) with and without embedded artwork. I just don't see the size making THAT much of a difference.

[MrBS]

Well they're not 'HUGE' but they're pretty sizable. Quick check shows my music store purchases have about 100k image in each one.

Multiply that by 7 thousand songs (my library) and suddenly that's 700 megs of album art, as opposed to 50 megs if they did it by album. Not a huge hit on a hard drive but annoying. That's one more cds worth of info you need to burn when you back up your music, or 650 more megs of bandwidth you need to use when transferring your music files.

For a 2.5 minute aac encoded song the album art contributes to about 4% of the file size, so your 10,000 song iPod only gets 9,600 songs in it. I personally would rather have the extra 400 songs than album art I can't retrieve, transfer or even view in my pocket.

All that being said, it's just not a very elegant solution to the problem. And it's a pain in the arse to maintain. Assuming you don't purchase 100% of your songs from the music store you need to go through and update all these pictures yourself, selecting each track and pasting in the image. How much nicer would it be to be able to grab your buddy's "Album Art" folder from his itunes directory and have most of it just like that?

~BS

[tavilach]

Bah!

A while ago, I downloaded a song with 300x300 cover art. Just now, I downloaded a song from the same album, and the art was now 600x600! I downloaded another song from a new album, though, and it only had 300x300...

This is so annoying...it looks like they're trying to increase the sizes of all the art, after I had already resized the art from five songs I downloaded, thinking this wouldn't spread to everything.

Whatever. Until it's universal, I won't have 600x600. I just replaced the art with that of the old song.

[tavilach]

Oh boy...

The album artwork used to add about 100 kilobytes...

Now it adds 500 kilobytes (the 600x600 pixel kind).

I've finally realized why some of the 30 second clips have album artwork! They have 300x300 album artwork in the 30 second clip, and when you download them, you get 600x600 artwork. The ones that don't have any album artwork in the 30 second clip are the ones that only give you 300x300 album artwork upon purchase. I probably noticed a gradually increase of album artwork in the previews, because more and more songs are becoming linked to the 600x600 system...

...but...

500 kilobytes! Way too much! From now on, I'll be saving the 600x600 artwork in a folder, and then resizing it to 300x300. When I get my iPod, I don't want my library to be so much bigger than it should be! Who needs 600x600? 300x300 is perfect!

[legacyb4]

Any idea why a 300 x 300 artwork file that is 20k in the Finder adds almost 1.7MB to a 14 song album? Obviously, it's not just the file size that gets added to the ID3 tag info, but jumping from 280k to 1.7MB is a bit insane...

[Mediaman_12]

Originally posted by legacyb4:
Any idea why a 300 x 300 artwork file that is 20k in the Finder adds almost 1.7MB to a 14 song album? Obviously, it's not just the file size that gets added to the ID3 tag info, but jumping from 280k to 1.7MB is a bit insane...

iTunes add the 'album cover art' to all the track's of the individual album, If you get the art from another source (ie using Amazon if you rip the tracks from the CD) and drag and drop the image in to the albums 'get info' window, it asks if you want to modify X number of files. So the more tracks an album has the more disk space it will take up if you include the art.

[ambush]

pooorrrr favor

[Truepop]

wait. tavilach, did you want to make all your files 600x600 about a month ago?


Edit: oh I see this is a thread from May. sorry.

[yukon]

I've been wanting iTunes to do what I keep hearing other players do (specifically OGG players), read the album art for an album from an image file in the album folder. Not insanely difficult, saves space when you don't have to put the image in every single file, and it saves the writer from mucking around in and bloating the ID3 tags.

I started adding art to all of my albums (Sofa was good for that), then I realized it would add an extra 350mb or so to my collection, rather than the 50mb or so that others would have. That may not sound like much, but it's about the size of an average size discography, and a whole lot of work to redo it when iTunes implements the "artwork in folder" feature. As soon as this is done, I'll get all of my artwork from one source, and it'll be standardized that way.

[Truepop]

Originally posted by yukon:
I've been wanting iTunes to do what I keep hearing other players do (specifically OGG players), read the album art for an album from an image file in the album folder. Not insanely difficult, saves space when you don't have to put the image in every single file, and it saves the writer from mucking around in and bloating the ID3 tags.

I'm the opposite. I like the fact that itunes puts the artwork in the file. I wish it would put more info like the rating and the playcount in the file... maybe even lyrics and eq settings.

though it does sounds like bloat, I had a bad crash in June and lost my all of my music. I had a backup of about 1/3 of the music but the xml file wouldn't link up correctly and I lost my ratings and playcount. trying to relink manually 6000-something files wasn't going to happen and I would still need to rip the other 2/3... it really pissed me off.

[yukon]

Heh, yeah, I've lost my playcounts and ratings, right now I'm building up my ratings so I can trim my collection, if I were to lose them now I'd be on rhythmbox faster than a windows upgrade isn't.

Sounds like you want to be on the opposite side of the "tagging" spectrum, with vorbis. You can set arbitrary fields, make up your own, to identify your songs. Like, just make a Rating tag. Of course, your player probably won't support it....I prefer standardization, ID3 2.4 seems to have anticipated most of what I want (just missing ratings, maybe a non-comment quality description tag), though players seem to have "standardized" on a few ogg vorbis tags.

I don't mind having the ability to add art to the MP3, it's what's best when you transfer one MP3 at a time (think Napster downloading, or Kazaa) so the downloader gets the art. But now people have the tech to rip entire albums (or think BitTorrent, eMule). Most people distribute album art in the folder, I think it would be awesome for iTunes to be able to see the .jpg, rather than me selecting all of the album, and dragging the image to the window, and waiting for it to add anywhere from 8k to 4mb to the filesize of every song on the album (gotta love the high-res scans).

Now, off to convert FLAC/Cue->Wav->AIFF->CD & MP3. Gotta be funny and make it a CD image, huh. That's MacFLAC->Daemon Tools->iTunes->Toast & LAME.

[d4nth3m4n]

ace or base? haha!

and i NEVER use the album art function, in fact i never have an itunes window open. just get it running and thats it for me and itunes.

[webb3201]

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
ace or base? haha!

and i NEVER use the album art function, in fact i never have an itunes window open. just get it running and thats it for me and itunes.

Maybe iTunes is trying to keep people from seeing your "Ace of Base" album art over your shoulder. Shrinking the album picture is feature to help you save face!

[lavar78]

Originally posted by yukon:
I prefer standardization, ID3 2.4 seems to have anticipated most of what I want (just missing ratings, maybe a non-comment quality description tag)

I desperately want a "guest artist" tag. I loathe how the iTMS does it (every artist in the artist field) -- it increases the number of artists and splits up albums if they aren't marked as compilations. OTOH, my standard procedure isn't great either (adding "(feat. ____)" to the end of the song title) -- it pollutes the song titles. I also don't want to clutter up the comments field with guest artists. It's such a common occurrence; I liken it to the CC field in an email. Then we could make smart playlists with parameters like "any artist is _____."

[Luca Rescigno]

I just delete all my album artwork. I never look at it and I really don't care what the album cover looks like.

[yukon]

I desperately want a "guest artist" tag. I loathe how the iTMS does it

Didn't know iTunes did that as well, cool, I'm standard ;-). It really is the best available tag, it doesn't make sense to have it in the title, and you're right, it does split up albums and make one-mp3 artist folders. A "Featuring" or "Guest" tag would be cool. Now that I think about it, I want a description tag....I use Genre for that usually, but stuff like "fast beat, pulsing, ambient parts, instrumental" would be much better than my current "Electronica IDM"....giving every song a genre like that was work, but it's awesome to have the keyword based playlists etc.

I still rip to MP3 with LAME, vorbis would be better, but nothing supports it well (portable stuff is the main concern, iTunes can be made to barely support it). I know people who reencoded to ogg because everything on Linux has terrible MP3 support but ogg is fine, I couldn't do that to the quality of my collection ;-)

Oh, trying out a program from musicbrains.org, automatic tagging program. Seems to work pretty well, needs work on reading tags (it read my older tags, things showed up that I had fixed long ago but iTunes didn't update both tag versions).

[tritonus]

Originally posted by lavar78:
I desperately want a "guest artist" tag. I loathe how the iTMS does it (every artist in the artist field) -- it increases the number of artists and splits up albums if they aren't marked as compilations. OTOH, my standard procedure isn't great either (adding "(feat. ____)" to the end of the song title) -- it pollutes the song titles. I also don't want to clutter up the comments field with guest artists. It's such a common occurrence; I liken it to the CC field in an email. Then we could make smart playlists with parameters like "any artist is _____."

Exactly. Workaround: I use the "Comment" field for for my jazz and classical collection (example):

Sonny Rollins
Wilbur Ware
Elvin Jones

Arthur Rubinstein
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Erich Leinsdorf

Simply use the search field in iTunes, full-text search also works with "Comments". So I enter "Elvin Jones" and get all the tracks he is playing as a leader or sideman. Have fun!

[tritonus]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
I just delete all my album artwork. I never look at it and I really don't care what the album cover looks like.

I never started using it in the first place. Even though I was tempted by my new iPod photo, I prefer to read more text (long artists/album/song titles) than having the album cover with me on-the-go. I still can get the physical CD off my shelf for every AAC on my iPod.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by yukon:
Now, off to convert FLAC/Cue->Wav->AIFF->CD & MP3. Gotta be funny and make it a CD image, huh. That's MacFLAC->Daemon Tools->iTunes->Toast & LAME.

?

Over here it's MacFLAC 2.1.2 (outputs AIFF) -> iTunes (labeled by hand, converts to ALAC or MP3 and burns CD).

If I'm converting commercial stuff rather than live recordings and don't feel like labelling by hand, I burn first and then import from CD.

iTunes will also work with WAVs equally as well as with AIFFs, as will Toast. They're essentially the same thing, with different headers.

-s*

[Wevah]

The ID3v2.4 spec actually defines many, many "artist"-type frames, including stuff like "Lead artist/Lead performer/Soloist/Performing group" (the standard "artist" tag), "Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment", "Interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified by", "Original artist/performer", and a bunch of others for lyric writers, conductors, misc. involved persons, etc.

Unfortunately (of course), most players and taggers don't deal with anything beyond the general "lead artist" frames.

[yukon]

Spheric, a FLAC/Cue album requires mounting or burning, then to be ripped off of the mounted volume. Most burning or mounting applications do not support FLAC (OK, so Nero does with a plugin, couldn't get it to use it), so the file (singular) needs to be converted to WAVE first. Once ripped from the volume to AIFF or WAVE files (plural), you can encode MP3s from each file, and burn the AIFF files to CD (having seperation between tracks). AFAIK MacFLAC doesn't support cue sheets, it's what I was using, though I didn't explore that much, and I didn't feel like installing fink or anything to do it in CLI. Unless it does support it and you didn't mention that, you were thinking of multiple FLAC files to comprise an album, where FLAC/Cue would be a single FLAC file with a cue sheet saying what durations each song is (a music "disk image", same thing as bin/cue). I hate it, people use it because it simplifies distribution (two files), maybe they'll figure out Tar someday.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by yukon:
Spheric, a FLAC/Cue album requires mounting or burning, then to be ripped off of the mounted volume.

Ah, okay. All the .flac'ed music I've downloaded (including everything so far from legal live-show sharing sites) has been individual song file .flacs in a folder, which are simpler to deal with.