Embedded Album Art - Change Priority?

[Bangone]

Hi!
I have all my files organized in folders, each of them with its album art called "cover.jpg".
It has been working just fine with my previous mp3 player, but now with Rockbox installed it's a big mess, because it gives the priority to the embedded album art instead of giving it to the jpg file... how can i change this??
Thank you very much!

[[Saint]]

Personally, I wasn't particularly happy with the change to default to embedded art - but that's a discussion best suited elsewhere, so I'll tackle the question.

You basically have 3 options.

Well...there's technically 4 options, but one of those options is "do absolutely nothing", so I don't think it counts.

Option 1:

Strip all your embedded album art from the media files.

You're probably just wasting space better suited for audio storage. Most embedded art is of a quality that is FAR greater than the range of supported devices can make good use of (high resolution hosted/application targets excluded). Any image file that is greater in dimensions than the smallest dimension of the devices resolution is wasteful, since this is the maximum whole image that could ever be displayed. Anything beyond that is downscaled, costing CPU time as well as additional storage space. This is usually compounded by the fact that you'll have N copies of *exactly the same image* (where N == number of tracks in the album), embedded art is easy for some, but very wasteful.


Option 2:

Embed all your album art and strip out the (now irrelevant) cover.jpg/bmp images. (see above for my thoughts on embedded art)


Option 3:

Download our sources and recompile Rockbox to suit your requirements. Its FOSS, we hand this power over to you, if you want it.


Option 4:

Shrug indignantly, and move on.


We can help you with any of those options, should you require it.


[Saint]

[Bangone]

Ahahah great answer!
Well let's check all the solutions one by one:

Option 1:

Strip all your embedded album art from the media files.

You're probably just wasting space better suited for audio storage. Most embedded art is of a quality that is FAR greater than the range of supported devices can make good use of (high resolution hosted/application targets excluded). Any image file that is greater in dimensions than the smallest dimension of the devices resolution is wasteful, since this is the maximum whole image that could ever be displayed. Anything beyond that is downscaled, costing CPU time as well as additional storage space. This is usually compounded by the fact that you'll have N copies of *exactly the same image* (where N == number of tracks in the album), embedded art is easy for some, but very wasteful.

I thought about this solution but I couldn't find an easy way to do it just in once for all my files... moreover, I read somewhere that when you play a song without the embedded album art with some players like VLC, the program automatically downloads and embeds again the album art!

Option 2:

Embed all your album art and strip out the (now irrelevant) cover.jpg/bmp images. (see above for my thoughts on embedded art)

I didn't even consider this option for the same reason as above... I spent hours in order to have a "cover.jpg" in every folder and only the idea of embedding the album art in every single mp3 makes me sick

Option 3:

Download our sources and recompile Rockbox to suit your requirements. Its FOSS, we hand this power over to you, if you want it.

This would be just awesome. There's just a problem: I have no idea about how to do something like this and I absolutely don't know how complicated recompiling Rockbox could be! You know, when I finished school I wanted to study engineering but at the end I chose law... so programming is unfortunately not one of my skills

Option 4:

Shrug indignantly, and move on.

We can help you with any of those options, should you require it.

And this is the most interesting part!
If you or anybody else could help me (especially for the 3rd option) it would be awesome!

Thank you in advance

[saratoga]

Well the wiki explains in great detail how to compile rockbox (link is under "dev guide" on the left side of your screen), but if you can't program, then its probably not going to help you much. 

[toehser]

I'll just offer that getting up to speed with batch-tag-manipulation to automatically munge groups of files is probably going to be easier than the source-modify-build route...  Since you need Linux going anyway for sane development, you can use the Linux mp3 tag tools.  There are command line programs with Linux such as id3, id3tool, eyed3, id3v2.  If you want to go the source route... it involves C programming and Linux...

[silvertree]

Like the others, I am disappointed to learn about this change, however, I have been embedding art in all my new items for a the past few months because I share my library with an itunes user.

I have learned to use a very powerful tagging tool called mp3tag.de

If you were to check out this forum post, you would find enough information to get you started on a batch process to add all cover.jpg into the tag of each music file you have.  [understand that mp3tag supports all common music formats, not just mp3]

http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=8778

[Bangone]

Hmm I guess I'll have to see how this mp3tag works...
But since there seems to be a quite a few people with the same problem, do you think that anyone could have already solved it modifying Rockbox itself?

[[Saint]]

This topic spawned some discussion in our IRC channel yesterday, to cut a long story short, one of our very competent developers (gevaerts) whipped this up for this case:

Change-Id: I7b2c29e8f9652d33722f0074e3f2814eb5d3eeb4 Add a setting to allow preferring file-based album art.

If you can work with patches and compile Rockbox, testers would be appreciated.


[Saint]

[Bangone]

This topic spawned some discussion in our IRC channel yesterday, to cut a long story short, one of our very competent developers (gevaerts) whipped this up for this case:

Change-Id: I7b2c29e8f9652d33722f0074e3f2814eb5d3eeb4 Add a setting to allow preferring file-based album art.

If you can work with patches and compile Rockbox, testers would be appreciated.


[Saint]

Before you begin, be aware that this process can require a decent amount of time and technical knowledge and should not be attempted by a casual user

I guess I'm not the right person for this 
Anyay I'll give it a look and see if I can understand something... thank you very much Saint!