Mac OS 14.6.1, Mp3tag 1.9.6, Foobar2000 v2.5 preview 2025-06-27, *.opus files
I do not know where to go to find out the specifics of exactly what happens when a program embeds art to a file. I must not have the proper search term, because searching only brings up how to embed, or create, or manipulate cover art files, but not how the programs interact with the data. So if there's obvious documentation of this, please forgive me.
So, Art is not a tag, right? It's Art, and it's... I guess accessed by whatever program you're using? Again, I have no clue how it works. For MP3tag, I guess it puts the a> Picture, sets the b> Type, and then the optional c> Description. Foobar2k does the same, but without the last option. So that leads me to these questions.
Putting cover art of a certain type with Mp3tag shows up in Foobar2k, but not vice versa; a "Front" Type from Foobar shows up blank in Mp3tag. However, in the latter scenario, deleting Art in Mp3tag deletes the F2k Art as well. So... what different places are these pics being kept?
I cannot find any documentation on Types that go deeper than "set Type to Front if Front". There seems to be no standard, I take it? F2k has "Disc", MusicBrainz documentation has "Obi", Mp3tag has... "Fish"? And sure, it works well for scripting (export "Cover" only of Type "Fish"), but if cross compatibility and standardization aren't really there, then I might as well use Type "Other" + a specific description ("Case - 01 - Booklet - 01 - Front", "Case - 05 - Insert - 02 - Back", etc etc). Unless there's a non-"Other" way to set a custom Type?
F2k allows only one Art per Type, but Mp3tag seems to allow a much greater amount. However, it seems the Mp3tag cover scripting describes attributes of the "first cover art in the tag of the file", so am I correct to assume that they're not put in a table of sorts? Like, without a description, can I access cover.jpg[2] in Type "Front"?
If you've made it this far, I thank you kindly for your time 8^)
Well, the simple explanation is: It's metadata that's added to a metadata section in a different way depending on the format.
Here's a link to the technical specification of the ID3v2.3 format.
As far as I know for Opus it is the Vorbis Comment format:
Thank you, Poster. I spent the last month really going over stuff and thinking about it, and… all of that is weird. I understand it, it’s just… I dunno, both a bit overwhelming and not really clear.
Anyway, I think I found what I’d like to do, but I believe Mp3tag is currently unable to do it. The long and the short of it is, wildcards don’t work for Mac when importing cover art, you can’t set a description as the filename on import, and multiple files per cover type (… fish?) are unintuitive to juggle (IMHO).
MP3tag allows to set a number of cover types as this is possible for some file types.
If a particular type is not supported by the target format you get "Other" or the default type.
As you compare pictures in Foobar with those in MP3tag: have you checked that Foobar actually embeds the pictures?
Yup, a lot of that info was in Poster’s link. Thank you kindly.
In the month since my original post, I upgraded both my Mac OS and Foobar. So whether or not that original issue was my error, I do not know, because any attempt to recreate it doesn’t work. So anything I put in the file via Foobar shows up in Mp3tag, and vice versa, which is correct behavior.
The only thing I noticed, which is curious but not pressing, is that Foobar seems to only show the last image of a type that was attached to the file. So if I put 5 “Front” pictures in via Mp3tag, FB will only show the very last one. It does not show any “Other” pictures.
That looks to me like a good question for the Foobar support forum.
If you know the features of your player (e.g. can handle only 1 picture) and the resulting requirements then MP3tag is probably capable to adapt the metadata accordingly.
fb2k has a fixed set of supported covers, i.e., one of front, back, artist, and disc. It assumes that it doesn't make sense to add more than one, e.g., front cover.
