Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Album Art

[Charles Schmidt <cschmidt2 emich edu>]

On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 20:25 +0200, Fredrik Noring wrote:
> 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. :)

True true.

> 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:

Does anyone (off chance) know the ogg comment equivalent?  What about
the other media formats that RB supports (or, rather, gstreamer does),
do they have this functionality as well?

>    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.

I dunno.  Then RB would have to load the id3 tag and parse it on start
up.  Seems to me it should be stored/cached somewhere.  Perhaps not in
the DB (although, why not?) but perhaps it could be written out to a
file and the path to that file stored in the db?  I dunno.

> > 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? :)

No, I meant like adding them after the fact now.  Like, all my music has
is tagged, and any new music is tagged either automatically when its
ripped or I do it on the command line.  Retagging some 5000 songs is a
bit daunting ;)

> Fredrik

-- 
-charlie