embedded art sizes

Support
1

I have been working through my entire music collection, adding art to everyt track - mosly using select all fiels, drag and drop to the window provided in mp3tag, save.
what I don't understand and cannot find via searches is - does mp3tag rescale the dragged image at all or does is simply embed whatever is given.

so for example if I use amazon I can search for an album & see a cover picture which I can save, drag, drop etc. but amazon will also often have the option to see a larger picture. if I go that extra step, does it make a difference to what gets embedded.

the other opton is to use the find cover art menu function and go with the size of image that that brings in - will that be differenct from doin it all manually ?

I have a lot of guitar instuction book+CD combinations, and have been taeing a similar approach - find the book on amazon then embed that book picture into the audio files. adain I am unsure what impact different sized book images will have.

using zoom player for playback I can certainly see that some pictures are bigger & sharper, it's very noticable where I've only found a small cover art picture as zoom seems to scale up the very small ones for display while the audio is playing.

2

One thing you can do is add a column to the Mp3tag detail line to display the cover size. Go to View > Customize Columns > New, make the name Cover Size and put %_cover_size% in for Value and Field.

Then look at all of your tracks and sort by Cover Size. You can then find the tracks with very small cover sizes and fix them. You might also check ones that are very large to see if they cause any problems.

3

thanks - that suggests that MP3TAG adds in whatever size image you give it, without any up or down scaling ?

4

Exactly. (so does iTunes and so does WMP).
If you want any rescaling the freeware albumartfixer might be an option.

5

well - wmp does annoying stuff to art in folders.
e.g. if you place an image called folder.jpg in a album folder, then WMP11 downsizes it to 200x200 & also flags it as system +hidden.
I have taken to keeping a copyof-folder.jpg in there also.
I never figured how to make WMP embed art into tracks and never trusted it's ability to search internet automatically for folder art without lots of mistakes, so I've done all of mine manually with MP3tag and have disabled intent updates.

I read that wmp12 in WIn 7 does similar downsizing tricks and also that WMP12 displays the folder art rather than the track-embedded art.

6

Actually what happens is when you put song with an album art tag into the WMP library, it uses the tag image to create a 200x200 folder.jpg file and writes over your file. It also creates a 75x75 file called AlbumArtSmall.jpg. Both files are hidden system files. When you do an internet lookup it creates two more jpg files and a desktop.ini file. (another reason I don't like WMP). After that point it always uses those files for the album art and never uses the tag.

WMP never updates the album art tag, just the jpg files.

7

yes- i eventually worked that out but you explained it much better than I did!

in order to keep my music folders in synch, I had to write a batch program that reset the hidden & system attributes, before running synchromagic utilitiy,otherwise changes to source folders woudl not overwrite target folders but would give access denied errors.