Album art - embed in file or store in folder

[extracampine]

Just wondering what views are on how to store album art. Consider that for most albums I have high(ish) res front, back, cd and booklet scans (around 800kb per file average but varies up to 3MB per image file).

 

Music is stored in FLAC and I'm currently using Foobar.

 

Images can be embedded in the file via ID3 tags or stored in the same folder as the music files.

 

Thanks!

 

[PeterSt]

I am of the opinion that album art is bound to the album (and not to a track), and therefore needs to exist at the album level. Besides that it is (or at least can be) a dynamical thing. It should be editable "stand alone" and as easy as files can be manipulated. This does not work so by means of embedded tagging of course (let alone the redundancy because of it needing to be in the tracks).

 

Of course this requires playback software which can deal with it that way, and not all software does. But the other way around counts just the same : not all software deals with embedded art data.

 

One other thing to possibly consider is that this "album art" can really be anything, up to complete videos. And, we may wonder whether this really "anything" can be obtained in embedded tag data.

 

Maybe it is also not to underestimate what space the album art can occupy. Like you said, up to 3MB of size for an image (but really, 30MB can easily exist too). With complete booklets this can easily approach the track size itself. And this per track. This looks "double" space needed to me.

 

All 'n all -and in general- I would say it will me more convenient to carry the album art with the music data - for playback. For maintenance it looks the other way around though.

For me it is the best to have it outside of the music data, but then I use that type of player which can deal with that (as you will know).

 

Regards,

Peter