Store Album Art inside MP3 tags?

[UweD]

Many years ago I found a tool called Mediamonkey (MM) that helps me to organize everything nicely with my love of music. I now have a large collection. Uploading the files to the iPhone is also great. So I'm a big fan of Mediamonkey.
But what has become very time-consuming over time is the album art. Not just finding it. Editing it, making the file smaller so that it doesn't bloat the MP3 and then saving it in the MP3 tags.
A while ago I also added some audio books to my collection. A book can have 300 mp3 files. If you include a graphic file with (e.g.) 100kb in the tags, the directory swells by 30MB.
And often you have a file in a great resolution and then make it smaller just because of the storage space it takes up in the tag.
I am therefore wondering whether I could save a lot of time (and space) if I no longer saved the album art in the MP3 but as a folder.jpg in the same directory as the album. MM was of course able to do this before, but there were sometimes problems when transferring the music to the iPhone and the album art was then missing.
Please excuse the long backstory. I would like to proceed as follows:
(General: The directory structure is <artist>/<album>/track#-title.mp3, there are no graphics of the album art in the tags...)
a) The front cover is saved as a folder.jpg in the same directory
b) The back cover is saved as a folder-back.jpg (this means it is listed after folder.jpg)
Advantages:
- High-resolution covers are possible
- No wasted space (why does every MP3 have to contain the same album art again?)
- Less work when putting the albums together.

I want to write a small AutoHotKey script that makes these changes for me. That's why I wanted to get some feedback from the MM developers beforehand. Is there anything that speaks against doing this, especially leaving the album art out of the MP3 tags?
If the music is synchronized to the iPhone, is the album art (front cover) of the folder.jpg file also synchronized? Will this work also with future version of MM.
Thanks for your ideas and answers.

[Lowlander]

There is always a risk that Artwork isn't seen by software/hardware as there is no direct connection between the audio and image files. When using Album folders with the Artwork in them, there generally shouldn't be an issue with MediaMonkey, and Sync should also work, but other software/hardware would need to be able to do this too (if you ever happen to use them).

The questions is if the extra size of storing it in the tags is really an issue with today's large storage. That would be a personal one to answer.

[TheEmpathicEar]

There is always a risk that Artwork isn't seen by software/hardware as there is no direct connection between the audio and image files. When using Album folders with the Artwork in them, there generally shouldn't be an issue with MediaMonkey, and Sync should also work, but other software/hardware would need to be able to do this too (if you ever happen to use them).

The questions is if the extra size of storing it in the tags is really an issue with today's large storage. That would be a personal one to answer.

Storing artwork in Tags: Is this handled by caching it to avoid duplication?

[Lowlander]

Don't know what you mean by caching in this context.

[TheEmpathicEar]

Don't know what you mean by caching in this context.

I was just wondering if MMA [for example] had some way of caching all of the same artwork that would otherwise be duplicated track by track? Maybe it would be too much work.

[Lowlander]

Oh MMA. It uses 1 Artwork per Album, but if you have Artwork embedded it will be embedded in each file (MMW can extract embedded Artwork on Sync to MMA).

[UweD]

I did some further testing and found that it is somehow unclear for me how MM decides which of the graphis in the folder is the front cover. In MM settings you can set "Scan directories for artwork", but if there is more than one file, which is going to be the cover graphic?
With several albums it worked with folder.jpg to be choosen by MM as cover art, but when there were more graphis in the same folder then sometimes "folder.jpg" was NOT choosen as cover.
In Detail:
folder.jpg, front0.jpg, inside.jpg, rear01.jpg, rear02.jpg are the graphics, folder.jpg is 1000x1000 365kb, front0.jpg is 2869x1402 4.89MB ... and front0.jpg was choosen. Or in an other case "rear.jpg" was choosen over "folder.jp".
Does MM just query the folder and first created/ first found .jpg file is then set as front cover?
Or is there a specific file name search pattern (in MM it was folder.jpg if I remember correctly) like:
IfExist "folder.jpg" => {set as front cover }
Else => {IfExist "cover.jpg" => {set as front cover}} ...
Moving all other graphics to AlbumArt sub folder solves it for now, but maybe you have some comments.

And one more question out of curiosity, when sending the cover graphic to iPhone is is then reduced or edited in size? Is it sent as one file or embeded in the audio file?

Thank you all again.

[Rob_S]

This issue of unattached artwork seems to come up alot.

Personally I prefer embedded (stored in tag) art, as I can then send the tracks by playlist individually regardless of album/folder affiliation, and the artwork will be there. I find smaller sized art sufficient for my purposes, and no significant impact on my storage.

However if you want multiple artworks per album, and want large sized versions, this would definitely add up. I wonder if it is possible to embed a smaller sized "cover" art in each track, and still have the larger artworks in the folder?

How it exactly works does seem to be a bit of a mystery sometimes, especially when it come to the caching of thumbnails, which I believe are what shows up when you display your tracks in List by album view.

I don't use MMA so I can't offer any insight into how things get handled over there after a sync.

[Lowlander]

You can configure how Artwork is Synced (MediaMonkey 2024 is required)

[TheEmpathicEar]

2024? Are we talking about MM5?

[Rob_S]

Current beta stream, now at Release Candidate stage is and will be called V2024, no longer V5.

You can have it now, from here:

viewtopic.php?p=523599#p523599

Your gold lifetime works, regular gold may require an upgrade fee.

[TheEmpathicEar]

Thanks. Sometimes I forget what I have!

[UweD]

... in the end my perspective would be:
Same as having the subtitles outside of video files (*.srt file) it makes sense not to embed album cover into the audio file. This is old style. If we have let's say 10 audio tracks why would we add the same graphic to each of the files?
If we have the album art saved inside the same folder as the audio files that should suffice... VLC and MM and every software I use are picking up the folder.jpg (or cover.jpg). Putting the graphic inside the first track may still make sense - but let's not put a duplicate in every track.
But there are still a few oddities:
If the folder.jpg album art file was replaced or changed MM will not see it because <as of now> it checks the audio files for changes not folder.jpg. If you want to change the album art you need to change the mp3 (e.g.) file (drop into Mp3Tag and press save to change the file date, that makes MM see it). So to enable that album art is stored outside as a file and not embeded, MM would need to say clearly which file it will recognise (folder.jpg, priority list?) and it should then also check the datestamp of these album art files it embeded into the database to enable easy updating of album art.
Also, as mentioned I am embedding the album art only into the <first> audio file of an album (or audiobook). This works also fine. Only a small thing I noted with MM, it will list me these album audio files as "inconsistent album art", shows me a SAVE button (starting with track 2...) beside the album art area (right side below), which would store the album art then in the consequent tracks. MM is not prepared fully for either of these space saving solutions (no album art embedded but as folder.jpg, or album art only embedded inside first track). But still both work good enough in MM for me. Maybe future releases can make way to these two different ways to store album art.
Thank you for reading... and your compasion with music and MM!