More album art weirdness!!!

I use MP3Tag. I have a Sansa Fuze.

I noticed that some of my album art wouldn’t appear on the Fuze. On my PC, I checked out the tags, and found some of the JPGs as large as 500KB!!! In fact, a lot of them are 170x170 pixels and 255KB!!! It doesn’t make sense!

Now, I used to use MusicMatch Jukebox to tag files, and thought that perhaps it had inflated those JPGs somehow. But, I stopped using that software a long time ago, and there are still other weird things going on:

I recently noticed that if I copy a 200x200 or 240x240 JPG from the Internet onto the Windows Clipboard, then paste that JPG into MP3Tag, my album art runs 30-50KB. However, if I first save that JPG to my hard drive, then use the Add Cover option in MP3Tag, the same JPG will be half the size—about 15 to 25KB.

Remember, the JPG size in KB determines whether or not the album art appears on my Fuze; although these are just kilobytes, they still matter.

Does anyone understand why JPGs are enlarged when using the Windows Clipboard? Is there some kind of hidden watermarking going on or something?

When you copy the image to the clipboard it’s actually an uncompressed bitmap.  After you paste it into MP3Tag, it will be converted to a JPG.  However, MP3Tag may not be using the same compression settings as the original file so you can end up with a different size.

Ah ha!!! Thanks for explaining!!!

It’s a royal pain, however, going through tens of thousands of files, looking for the really HUGE JPGs that won’t show up on my Fuze or my wife’s iPod. Too bad these taggers don’t shrink things down to a predetermined size.

What size must the album art be to display? Most of mine are 800x800 and around 120kb in size. Some display, some dont. For example Death’s - Spiritual Healing displays and its 500x500 and 211kb, but Dark Tranquillity’s - Skydancer/Of Chaos And Eternal Night is at 800x800 and 127kb but doesnt display.

Im using MP3Tag with WMA 9.2 files.

Message Edited by agalloch on 04-17-2009 07:37 PM

@g33z3r wrote:

Ah ha!!! Thanks for explaining!!!

 

It’s a royal pain, however, going through tens of thousands of files, looking for the really HUGE JPGs that won’t show up on my Fuze or my wife’s iPod. Too bad these taggers don’t shrink things down to a predetermined size.

Not a pain at all if you use a little program called Easy Thumbnails

You can shrink any jpg file to a size of your choice and can even search your entire hard drive for files if you so desire.

@agalloch wrote:

What size must the album art be to display? Most of mine are 800x800 and around 120kb in size. Some display, some dont. For example Death’s - Spiritual Healing displays and its 500x500 and 211kb, but Dark Tranquillity’s - Skydancer/Of Chaos And Eternal Night is at 800x800 and 127kb but doesnt display.

 

Im using MP3Tag with WMA 9.2 files.

Message Edited by agalloch on 04-17-2009 07:37 PM

800x800 is WAAAAY too big. Use what you find online at Amazon or Wikipedia: 240x240 and 200x200. Save the images to your hard drive, then add them to your media later with MP3Tag—they’ll be tiny, and will display in your players.

My best guess is around 50KB for a maximum display size on the Fuze (but I’ve not really tested it or anything). Tagged images should easily weigh in at less than 20KB.

All of my album art is 400 x 400 and the Fuze displays them fine. There are isolated ones that dont, but I think it might be due to other issues. Resolution is not the issue though. I have tested album art at 500 x 500, and it displayed as well.

I dont know if it is just a coincidence, but I always have issues if I change tags with Vista, even with the same program. I used the exact same copy of Media Monkey on both Vista and XP machines…when tagged from the XP machine, the album art displays in the Fuze.  When tagged from the Vista machines, it doesnt. 

Yeah, I think we had figured that out. It’s all about memory footprint: once you pass a certain number of kilobytes, images won’t show up. This affects the iPod, too. My guess is a limit of around 30-40Kb.

But there is no good reason to have 400x400 or 500x500 pixel images–nothing on the market can display album art that large. It all gets scaled down, so you’re just wasting RAM. Between 160x160 and 200x200 is a reasonable range.

I’m actually going through my entire library and fixing the album art. It is a pain in the ass. Better to pay attention while you’re doing your tagging in the first place!!!

I am also adding a folder.jpg image to every folder containing a complete album; don’t know that I’ll ever actually need it (the images are already included in the MP3 tags), but what the heck.

Message Edited by G33Z3R on 05-25-2009 06:23 PM