Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Album Art

[Fredrik Noring <noring nocrew org>]

Hi Charles

> I wasn't even aware you could store them in the id3 tag.  Seems like a
> waste of space to store the image in every mp3 for an album, you know?
> Lets say you've got 22 songs on the disc, thats 21 copies of the image
> too many, imho.

Well, a typical album cover can be fitted within 50 kb. That's about
2-3 % of a typical mp3 file. Going from 128 kbit/s to 192 kbit/s on the
other hand requires 50 % extra space. :)

The big advantage with ID3 is of course that everything about the song
is contained within the file. So managing moving/copying files is
simplified. In any case, "cover.jpg" pictures in the directory can be
done while supporting ID3 pictures as well.

As for a strategy for finding the proper album cover, I think Rhythmbox
first should search all album songs for picture type $03 ("Cover
front"), then $00 ("Other", this is what iTunes uses I believe). Other
types such as $02 might apply too. The details can be found here:

   http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/id3/id3v2.3.0.html#sec4.15

The result of this search strategy should perhaps be stored in the
Rhythmbox database. The actual images need probably not be stored in the
database as they might require quite a lot of space. If you want to save
space: only one song/album need a ID3 picture because Rhythmbox can only
use one picture anyway.

> The cover.jpg way seems a lot more economical (and easier, since you
> don't need a tag editor).

Doesn't Rhythmbox sort of already require ID3-tags? :)

Fredrik