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  #1  
Old 08-23-2007, 04:00 PM
Jason Dunn
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Default Embedded Album Art: Microsoft Doesn't Seem to Get It

I'm a very visual person, especially when it comes to music (how's that for a strange statement?). When I'm deciding what music to listen to, I tend to use Windows Explorer and browse through thumbnails images of my album folder rather than use the text list inside Windows Media Player. There are probably a lot of people like me, because Windows Media Player 11 has an album art view that accomplishes the same purpose (ditto for iTunes).



The Windows Media Player 11 approach to album art is very limited though - it creates a folder, and drops a few JPEGs into that folder. The album art is associated with that folder, not the files inside it. This presents several problems, namely that once you remove the songs from the folders, you have no more album art. Album art inside folders makes for some spectacularly messy instances as well - when I enabled pictures in WMP10, and let it scan away, it picked up an extra 15,000 or so images, all album art. My list of photos should be of photos, but because Windows Media Player doesn't have any threshold for image file size (it does for audio and video), it picks up every single image. My Xbox 360 had the same problem - when I browse photos over Windows Media Connect, it picks up all my music album art, making for a confusing mess. Here's an example of how the current system makes for a sloppy state of affairs.

Imagine if metadata about a song or album was stored in an external XML file. You'd have to keep the song within the same folder as the XML file to have any information about it beyond the file name, and if you moved that song to another folder, you would lose your ratings, lyrics, and everything else inside the metadata file. Sounds ridiculous, right? It is, yet that's exactly the same scenario Microsoft considers acceptable when it comes to album art and music files.

Because Windows Media Player 11 on the desktop will scale down album art to fit in the player window (lame!), having high-res album art is a waste. After a lot of trial and error, I've decided that 600 x 600 pixels is a reasonable middle ground. It's big enough to have a great experience in Media Center when looking at the album art view, it's big enough to look good in WMP on the desktop, but not so big that it causes problems. The resulting JPEGs are in the 50KB to 150KB range depending on the complexity of the image.

Other Random Facts About Album Art

• Windows Media Player 10 Mobile (found on Pocket PCs and Smartphones) does not display embedded album art whatsoever, whether it be WMA or MP3. Boo! MSN Music and several other music providers embeds album art in the audio file, so this isn't some crazy thing that only I'm doing.

• The smaller JPEGs that I'm now using seem to be OK with WMP10 Mobile. I embedded an 89 KB JPEG and the player didn't choke on it. No idea where the safe threshold lies and if I'll have problems with the JPEGs that are 150 KB.

• The Portable Media Center media player doesn't display album art either. It must be based off the same codebase as the Pocket PC/Smartphone player? It sure makes for a boring-as-heck experience on the PMC without the album art.

• Embedded album art is supported in the Vista shell. This means you get a great experience seeing the album cover for each and every song, whether you're browsing inside WMP 11 or using Explorer.

• The Media Center software client will first look in the folder for the album art, so even if you have nice high-res album art embedded in the file it will ignore it - unless there's no album art in the folder, in which case it will read the embedded album art (mine looks fantastic!)...but there's a bug in Vista that will cause the first file played from that folder to display no album art, but the second track will. If you skip to the second track, then back to the first, the album art will be read.

Now, as to why embedded album art is a superior solution to the "art in a folder" concept that is currently championed by Microsoft (this text taken from something I wrote elsewhere):

"I found the Microsoft method of placing the album art in the music folder to be very short-sighted because it only works properly in a specific set of circumstances. When I moved songs to another computer, the songs themselves had no album art. And because FolderShare (a Windows Live service) makes all hidden files un-hidden when it syncs folders, I ended up with thousands of JPEG images scattered through my music folders. Since I often access my music via Windows Explorer rather than the still-kinda-slow library of Windows Media Player 11, when I'd drag and drop the folder of music the now un-hidden JPEGs would come along for the ride and show up in my playlist and stop the music as they'd display. It was a complete mess. The same kind of stupidity would occur if I dragged over a folder of music to my Zen Vision:M - I'd end up with low-res album art on the device."

Embedding the JPG album art inside the audio file itself is a much more elegant solution. For me it really boils down to logic: would EXIF data for photos work well as a separate XML file sitting in the same folder as the image? Would WMP star ratings work well if they were in a text file in the same folder as the song files? No way...embedded is the way to go.

Come on Microsoft, wake up and smell the album art!

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's a big fan of album art - can you tell?
 
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Old 08-23-2007, 05:16 PM
Dyvim
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I'm 100% with you on this one Jason. A couple of other observations:

1. why does WMP download such low quality album art? Usually 150x150 max.
2. why does WMP create 4 jpegs for each folder? As far as I can tell there are 2 copies of the 150x150 image and 2 copies of the 75x75 image. I don't even know why a 75x75 image is necessary- surely the computer can handle scaling down the 150x150 image.
3. why are some of the jpeg files named with GUIDs?
4. TCPMP (and CorePlayer) displays embedded album art on Windows Mobile devices. It's lame that WMP mobile can not.

I was introduced to the joys of embedded album art via iTunes and the iPod photo (now quite dated). At first I thought it was a waste (probably the same logic MS uses) because the same image is duplicated within every song file, increasing the amount of storage used (meaning less songs fit on your portable media player). But then I realized that even large images are small in size compared with high bitrate (or lossless) audio files and storage gets larger and cheaper every day. In addition to all the reasons you list above, it's also cool to be able to associate images to specific songs if desired rather than only to the album as a whole.
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Old 08-23-2007, 05:43 PM
Jason Dunn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dyvim
At first I thought it was a waste (probably the same logic MS uses) because the same image is duplicated within every song file, increasing the amount of storage used (meaning less songs fit on your portable media player).
I'm glad you realized that mentality is silly. ;-) Adding a 100 KB JPEG image to a file that's already 4 MB in size isn't a big deal at all when compared to the advantages it offers.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dyvim
In addition to all the reasons you list above, it's also cool to be able to associate images to specific songs if desired rather than only to the album as a whole.
I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. I could see a scenario where you had some live recordings of a band and you embedded different live photos from the concert into each file. That would be cool! Or think of the mix-tape made modern: you could embed personal photos into songs you're sending someone...imagine sending a nice Josh Groban tune with an embedded photo of you and your loved one...awww shucks.

Anyway, LOTS of creative possibilities with embedded album art!
 
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Old 08-23-2007, 06:48 PM
BabyJ2590
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Exactly. You can have many embedded images in the metadata. Personally, I put as many as possible (Front, Back, CD, Inlay 1,2,3, etc.). Time consuming? Certainly, but to me it's worth it. And with live concerts, I use pictures from the concerts, with special acoustic sessions, I find photos from the session, and the same with audio ripped from a DVD, I use the DVD cover.

I use ID3-TagIt, which allows you to categorize the type of image and then iTunes, which allow you to scroll through the images in the lower left corner, but the then click on the them to make it slightly full screen.

Jason, thanks for the facts.
 
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Old 08-24-2007, 03:58 AM
ctmagnus
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
I could see a scenario where you had some live recordings of a band and you embedded different live photos from the concert into each file.
I can't remember the source, but I found a podcast a while back that did just that - I had assumed that the initial album art would be the same through the whole episode, but I glanced down at it about 1/3 of the way through and the album art was different. iirc, there were three or four different images in that episode.
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