MediaMonkey forum

Hi,

I'm mostly a newbie when it comes to this stuff, so I hope you guys can forgive my stupid question. Here goes:

I've been waiting for the iPod Touch support in MM for a few months now. I don't have any huge issues with iTunes, but I HATE being forced to put album art into the tags before syncing it to the iPod. At least that was the only way I could figure out of doing it.
When I noticed the Beta was out, I tried it out as soon as I could. I encountered a couple issues, where albums I looked at in MM lost their Album Art in MM. So I decided to re-add them, but using MM.
Being a little freaky like that, I decided to see what would be the difference between the two programs. So I removed one of my bigger albums (66 songs), and re-added it with MM. This time the files did not contain the AlbumArt in the Tags, but MM detected a cover.jpg.
What I noticed is, while the files themselves are smaller (lack of album art in tag) the "Artwork" folder on my iPod had grown horribly. Before it was almost nonexistant, now its almost 30mb, after one album. I was using iPhoneList to check.

So the questions is:
Why are those files in the Artwork folder so huge? Is this an bug/issue or just how it is?

I have a different question, but one that belongs on this forum even less:
Does the iPod Touch read the Album Art from the File Tags (if such exist) or does iTunes copy it from the tag to the Artwork DB when syncing?

Thanks for your patience

I would also like to understand things a bit better concerning artwork and iphone/coverflow issues.

I have album art and the files are tagged with Album art in MM...but it seems when stuff is transferred to iphone using itunes that it is ignored...

I'm having other issues with iphone compatibility so it is difficult to isolate specific issues.

BUT, it seems as if coverflow works in its own way...if the same files that MM has tagged with art and uses in MM is loaded into itunes...it appears itunes ignores the tagged album art and downloads and installs its own artwork...totally ignoring the artwork in the music files tagged by MM...is this a coverflow thing?

All in all its confusing behavior...if anyone could shed light on how things are processed it would be appreciated.

Why are those files in the Artwork folder so huge? Is this an bug/issue or just how it is?

There has always been uploaded one album art item to Artwork folder per track (by iTunes and also by MediaMonkey - in order to be as compatible as possible). However, it seems that recently (at least for iPhone/Touch) iTunes writes only one item per album to Artwork folder in order to save some space. I'll look into it and implement it the same way in MM.

Does the iPod Touch read the Album Art from the File Tags (if such exist) or does iTunes copy it from the tag to the Artwork DB when syncing?

No, tags aren't important at all in iPods, everything including album art is read from special database files. Well, there is actually one exception - lyrics has to be stored in ID3v2 tag.

Jiri

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll be waiting eagerly for any updates to the Beta in regards to this iPhone/iPod Touch support.

I figured there must be an issue, since the increase in the .ithmb and ArtworkDB files was too big. After removing all files added by MM, the first have a total size of 30MB, and the DB is less than 100kb for around 850 songs with Art. After adding another ~70 I had 60MB of .ithmb files and 150kb DB. Almost double the size after adding 1/10th of the songs

I guess its because I underestimated iTunes. I figured that if in fact it uses the DB file as you confirm, then it would copy each image from each tag individually. Maybe its smart enough to compare them and not save the same one twice

It would make sense, since I have ~50 unique Album Covers for all the files. Then if MM added the new album art once for each song (~70) that would cause it to more than double in size.

Its still annoying that the only way to force iTunes to recognize Art is tags. Means that they're still there on my iPod, where they are useless.

Anyway, thanks again

Hi,

@jiri - iTunes writes one image to the artwork folder for Coverflow - turn it off and no image is put there.

Daz

This will be fixed in the next release, i.e. there will be only one album art item on device for each album (not per track as previously).

Jiri