Some cover art is pretty high quality when getting it through picard (thanks cover art archive!!), however this causes issues for some albums as its attempting to embed a 3000x3000 non optimized PNG, in the MB per art (I’ve seen 8mb at some point). This would probably be fine if there was only one per album (hence cover.png / cover.jpg) however once its applied to lets say, a compilation of 40 songs, you start to have issues.
Is there any method within picard to embed a lower quality cover art into the files, and then save the full resolution cover art next to the album?
Thanks for your help and heres also to hoping archive.org and the CAA can recover fully soon!
I think you can use the Save cover as separate files + Save only a single front image as separate file options, to store only one external cover, in the folder of your album rip.
You could also play around with the “Only use images of the following size” option in the Cover Art Archive section of the Cover Art Options settings. That way you could limit the image size to one of the thumbnail sizes generated by the CAA. Perhaps selecting “1200 px” would provide an image of sufficient qualty without it being a huge file.
This is what I’ve ended up doing for now, this works fine but for preservation reasons (and also I just want the highest res art) I also want to have the full-size image next to each album.
yep I had seen this option, what might be possible (but extremely tedious), would be to go through Picard once on my library, with low res embedded cover art size, save everything, then run through Picard again but with the save cover as separate file stuff enabled AND with cover art set to full size.
What also could be possible is to save it all as separate file, then run through the entire library with mp3tag to compress and resize the embedded art to a lower size. I might try this at some point.
Thanks everyone for your help! Looking forward to trying Picard 3
Great this works for you. Just keep in mind that plugins are currently not working. To avoid any issues I usually start with the --no-plugins command line parameter. We want to get back to work on the new plugin system soon.
Yep I noticed that, I only really use the rsgain plugin so for now I just tag my stuff and then run rsgain easy ~/Music/ after
edit:
seems maybe CAA is still being a bit finnicky since it was brought back up, it seems to be either very slow to load art in picard3 or fails even with a 60s timeout. I can access the fullsize cover art just fine and pretty quickly via my browser.
this is available for me and viewing just fine and loads quickly, however trying that same one inside picard leads to Coverart error: Socket operation timed out
thanks for the info, hopefully archive org can get everything up and running again. Still unsure why so many other cover art retrievals are failing in picard tho, most the art seems accessible to me.
I use cuetools to do this.
I keep the 'high quality ’ in the ‘source’ music folder and then encode to various player formats such as mp3 for the car. Cuetools will embed the artwork in each file as it encodes. You can specify the maximum size. If the artwork is bigger the max size, it will resize before embedding.
Cuetools works on a whole hierarchy of folders in batch mode.
