Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Evolution of the album cover support in rhythmbox

[Thomas Lunde <tlunde gmail com>]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 01:59:25 +0100, Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org> wrote:
> Actually, album art stored in an id3 tag should probably be used and
> preferred to album art fetched from amazon when available. 

+1 (and I'd give it more if I could) for two reasons:

a.  Amazon will _not_ be happy with us if we require a hit on their
servers for each track played.  It is a huge waste of bandwidth (and
quite expensive, for some users) to re-download the same .JPG each
time a much-loved song is played.

b. The best reason for storing album cover art once per song rather
than once per album is that it stays with the music whenever the music
file is moved.  Yes, it's a waste of disc space, but, given modern
hard disc sizes, an extra 1% overhead is, IMHO, worth it to have this
feature.

Given the iPod's popularity, many other competing devices will mimic
it where at all possible. Therefore, I believe that displaying each
track's embedded cover art (a la the iPod photo) will become a very
common feature in portable music players (and phones, too).  Because
stuffing the art into the music file is, by far, the easiest way to
ensure that the art is available on the portable device without
complex (and brittle) syncing schemes, I think that it will adding the
art to the music file at ripping time (or at the point of purchase, in
the case of downloaded media) will be the common case.  It seems a
no-brainer to display this art if it is available.

thomas