Save downscaled album art in database as cache

[Yakov5776]

Hey, the reason for this feature request is because every song I load takes a long time to load (5s-30s)
My proposal is to store a compressed version of the album art (e.g. 200x200) which is to be saved in the database so music with larger album arts won't take time to load anymore.

As of now, the only workarounds are either: (a) disabling album art covers or (b) downscaling/compressing album art manually using tools like mp3tag which is pretty tedious and requires A PC and modifying the original music file.

[saratoga]

How big is your album art? Generally resizing is relatively quick.

[Yakov5776]

My album sizes are 2000x2000, all my music use those dimensions.

Also, I'm not implying necessarily that the resizing aspect of it is what takes a long time (It could be loading the art into stream, parsing it, etc), All I'm saying is having this pre-resized in the database will guarantee performance for music with larger album arts that are anyways way above the resolution of the iPod screen.

[saratoga]

If the album art is embedded you have to parse it anyway to get to the audio, so only savings would be the resizing. At 4MP should be pretty quick I think.

Is it slow with embedded or folder jpg?

[Yakov5776]

Embedded

[saratoga]

I tried resizing a 2000x1500 folder.jpg on an e200v1 (slowest device I have) and it delayed about a second, maybe a bit less on track change.

I wonder if your files are slow if they're not embedded into files?

[Yakov5776]

Strange, this slowness does not happen to me when disabling album art.

Tomorrow I'll message you a zip of a few songs to try so you could try to reproduce the issue.
Also, they're in ALAC format in case that plays any role.

[saratoga]

The slower images are really big, 3000x3000 and several MBs which can take 5-10s in my testing.  Keeping the high resolution but compressing them a little more so that the files aren't so big largely resolves the slowness on my e200v1, so the issue is probably the time it takes to load and decompress the huge file more so than resizing.  Caching might help after all, but I don't know how easy that would be to implement.  Maybe a better option would be to skip album art above a certain size on slower devices.