Where is art stored? How big is it?

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dtgriscom
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Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2005 11:53 am

Where is art stored? How big is it?

Post by dtgriscom » Wed Sep 14, 2005 11:58 am

Once artwork is fetched by MPFreaker, where is the artwork stored? Is it in the song files themselves? How large is the artwork (on average)? Is the image for a single album duplicated in every song file for that album?

I've got 15,000 songs in 70GB of space; I'm trying to figure out how much more space I could expect to need if I add artwork.


Thanks,
Dan
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beastie
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Joined: Sun Apr 25, 2004 6:51 am
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Great question!

Post by beastie » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:15 am

dtgriscom wrote:Once artwork is fetched by MPFreaker, where is the artwork stored? Is it in the song files themselves? How large is the artwork (on average)? Is the image for a single album duplicated in every song file for that album?
Artwork added by MPFreaker is indeed stored in the song files themselves. For this reason, the image for an album does get duplicated in every song file. This may seem wasteful, but the overall amount of space added by art can be minor. Let's look at some facts:

By default, the *largest* images added by MPFreaker are 450 pixels and are JPG compressed at 80% quality. This generally makes them about 115KB each.

Many images MPFreaker finds are smaller (closer to 200 pixels) and/or already JPG compressed at lower quality, and these average 18KB each.

For the big picture, let's look at the portion of my entire library that has artwork which is no larger than 450 pixels wide (2953 songs). These have art averaging 58K, which means that these 2953 songs take up 0.17GB more than they would without art.

Final analysis: Extrapolating that to a library of 15,000 songs at 70GB, that means at worst it would probably grow by around 0.85GB. If you were to change MPFreaker's maximum artwork size down to 200 pixels (perfectly adequate for an iPod screen, for example), then your library would probably only grow by about 0.26GB.

Leon
Guest

Post by Guest » Thu Sep 15, 2005 6:32 am

Thanks for the response. This is definite FAQ fodder. If you don't want to post this much detail, perhaps you could mention in your front page that album art adds 1-2% to the size of an average MP3 file that would satisfy most people.
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