Can't display Flac album art in finder

Mac
1

I can see album art in MP3TAG with both flac and aiff formats and it shows up in finder in the aiff format but not flac. I can't figure out why or how to fix it. Maybe not an MP3TAG issue but thought I'd post here to see anyone has any insights.
Thanks

2

The problem with FLAC under macOS is that it is not really well supported by the system. Apple would like you to use their own lossless codec ALAC instead, which is based on MP4.

The Finder only shows album art for FLAC files that also have an ID3v2 tag, which is unfortunately not a valid tag format for FLAC files. FLAC has its own tagging format with Vorbis Comments.

Some applications have started to support ID3v2 for FLAC as well in order to avoid the support effort for this incompatibility. However, I prefer to stick to the standard in this case. From the FLAC format documentation:

Note however that the FLAC specification does not require compliant implementations to support ID3 in any form and their use is strongly discouraged.

You could try Apple Lossless ALAC to preserve the original quality of the files.

For your information: I reported this issue to Apple via the Feedback Assistant as FB9868853 Finder doesn't show album art preview icons for FLAC files tagged with VorbisComments, in case anyone wants to duplicate the report.

3

Thanks for your response Florian. The biggest issue for me is it shows on a Sony Mp3 music player. I'm not sure it does but I did open flac files with a couple of other music apps, Pine Player and XLD, and the album art from the flac file does show up in both of those so to your point I think it's a macOS issue.

When you say I could try Apple Lossless ALAC to preserve the original quality, you are referring to the quality of the album art or the audio file. I was under the impression flac was lossless and would preserve the original audio quality. Am I wrong?

4

Flac and ALAC are both lossless. So you can encode one to the other without any loss pf audio-quality. But in an Apple environment ALAC is much more supported.

5

One key difference is FLAC has the option for a checksum field. This is helpful for confirming data integrity of the file, ALAC does not have this. Sound quality-wise, I cannot perceive any difference between them when using the same bit depth and sample rates.

But for the Mac environment ALAC is fully supported, while FLAC depends on what programs you have installed.