Don't forget that the link occupies a few bytes as well :wink:

[quote="Potato"] ...keep my music files "clean" and small....[/quote]

Just a thought...

A 20KB JPEG image file is such a small addition to a 4000KB MP3 file that it hardly seems worth worrying about the extra space that embedding the image requires. If you have 60GB of MP3s, for example, embedding album cover image files for each MP3 might require an additional 0.5%, or 300MB, of storage.

Put another way: out of the maybe 15,000 songs you could fit on a 60GB drive, you could fit maybe 75 fewer songs if you embed the album covers.

Rik

Actually, my impression was that most software reads the pictures like that, for example Winamp and my iAudio MP3 player. It is an official ID3v2 standard, as can be seen under section 4.15 of this document:

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0.txt

Near the end of the paragraph about embedding pictures it says

[quote]There is the
possibility to put only a link to the image file by using the 'MIME
type' "-->" and having a complete URL [URL] instead of picture data.
The use of linked files should however be used sparingly since there
is the risk of separation of files.[/quote]

so that risk is stated and of course present, but I think that just with a software like MediaMonkey this wouldn't be too much of a problem (check for dead links and find new locations, just as it does now for the music files themselves). Anyway, as said before I would find this a much more convenient way to add pictures than by embedding them because you'll have to save them only once on your drive, keep your music files smaller and still have the pictures externally available to other software.[/quote]

I don't know if the id3 standard supports it, but this sounds like a dangerous feature to me. It would be easy to loose this link if either file gets moved alone. I would suspect that this leads to a lot of mess.
Anyway how many applications read this link field. Most know how to find album art by themselves, not sure if any can read the link field.

Hello

I have added album art to most of my tracks. I've added the album art to the respective folders in which the tracks are placed and only linked to the external picture files - to avoid having saved the pictures multiple times and keep my music files "clean" and small.

However, it seems MM does only synchronize the album art tags if the picture itself is being saved to the file. But ID3v2 does support just linking to external picture files.

I would like very much to let MM export its album art links to the tags so other applications can also know where to find the pictures. In the best case, MM would be able to export relative paths so that the links still work when the files are moved to another drive/directory.

Cheers
Potato