album art - embedding directly into the mp3?
 

I was happily reading over the list of improvements in 5.5 and I saw album art and decided to download. While I have a few complaints/questions one is burning most...

If winamp is set to display album art that is embed into the mp3, why can it not also embed the album art into the mp3 when you use winamp to update it?

As I currently see, when updating album art, Winamp plops a .jpg it got from AOL into your music folder.

Any thoughts?

Absolutely agree with you. Album art embedding into the file option is the thing I really miss in this Winamp release.

Totally agree. We should have the option to embed album art within MP3.

Also --- Winamp should auto crop all artwork so that it's square. I read the iPod won't show artwork unless the width/height is 1:1

that would be cool to see this too. I have all my MP3 in one main folder and not artist or group subfolders. All the embedded art get jumbled and messed up.

It would be cool to see winamp have a plugin or just take the media library data and embed it into the file or give the users a choice to embed or not.

Album art saving options are coming in a later release. It's the first release with Album Art Support, love will take a few point releases.

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....d=278538#notes

i'm sure this question was expected....but is there an estimated timeline?

"When it is ready."

Maybe this thread should be moved to the "Winamp Wishlist" forum?

Also, it would be nice if Winamp could be configured to display whatever jpg was in the album folder. In most of my album folders, I have a small jpg called coverart.jpg that has the album art in it. I do this so I can browse album covers with Directory Opus and they appear as CDs.

That is the whole point of this thread......you wouldn't have to play this stupid game......the image you want is already IMPLANTED into the mp3 itself....no more jpgs period.....;)

.. and i hope that embedding a cover would replace any existing cover art in the mp3. some mp3s have many of the same cover art embedded, and it's quite a mess.

From the apps I've seen thus far, some programs have the ability to strip all old album art first no matter how many and then replace it with the current art your adding.

The big reason it would be nice to have winamp do all this automatically is because all other programs can't do batch processing, or embedding, or album art at all.....there doesn't seem to be an automated process that is effective with the key criteria of the album art being embedded. Other apps can do it but with the jpgs which is like going round and round.....

Hopefully winamp comes through "when they can".....;)

Sawg speaks, and I am satisfied. I'm a patient man. Can I also assume that album art saving options will also be available when I create the mp3s? (i.e.import the cd). Or is that a whole 'nother story?

Side note/thought...all of my mp3s in one main folder with filename set as Artist - Trackname ...for life! I wonder how many people still prefer this way... i wonder how it began...

I have to admit, I've gotten used to how seamless MediaMonkey makes it to embed Album art into not only MP3s and would love to see Winamp also include this feature. MediaMonkey and even the (hated) iTunes support this feature and without proper batch tagging support (including adding Album art to many tracks without having to click "ok" more than once, thank you) Winamp is lagging behind.

If this feature is added to Winamp in the future, hopefully there will also be an option to automatically embed existing Cover.jpg files into the mp3s!

iTunes will only embed the image in the mp3 file if you drag/drop the image to the file. For album art that iTunes automatically downloads, it stores it in its own database (for CoverFlow performance, I would think). This is a reason to turn off the iTunes option to automatically download album art - this way you can be sure you have the art embedded in the file.

old thread but has winamp fixed up the feature to embed cover art directly into mp3 file?
i dont want to load itunes just to embed my cover art!!!!

quickest way to do embed cover art in itunes is to have firefox on one side with google image search then drag over to itunes - never have to go through agony of saving jpegs! winamp needs the same feature!!! just drag it to the album icon and it re-saves all the mp3s in that folder with the jpeg embedded! easy!! ? :)


Acidvader

Nope.

Personally, I find MP3tag is the best program to embed album art into your music. Try that :)

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/index.html

Is it so difficult to add this feature?

I am still switching to MediaMonkey to do this but it would be so much less hassle if Winamp could do it.

It would be less hassle also if Winamp would make my toast in the morning. That way I don't have to drag out the frikken toaster. That does not mean it is going to happen though.

Use something that is good and made for it. Read two posts above this one!!!

That was a part of Winamp when CD burning support was introduced. However, users starting complaining about all the crumbs building up in their CD burners, so toast support was removed in the next version of Winamp.

I also recommend this program. Its very easy and stable.

Any news on embedding album art? I mean it has been THREE YEARS since I last inquired.

:weird:

Same here!!! So many media players can embed the Album Art, why can't Winamp do it?

Hello. I created this thread almost four years ago. Any movement on this feature Sawg? It is sad to see every new release come out with more "features" (mostly online services I'll never use, but some good ones) but never this simple one that I know would greatly benefit every user.

Winamp has programmed to download the art, load, paste, etc, but can't get around to embedding? Is it very difficult? Or do they not the see need for the feature?

If they don't see the need (which is my assumption as it has been 4 years) then they miss one of the main powers of winamp vs all other players. Winamp doesnt hijack your organizational method, but caters to it. It also doesn't require you to use multiple other programs to get your music database and playing done.

With this one exception of course.

The ability to use Winamp to fetch text info from gracenote database, cover art (from aol?), and also DISPLAY embedded images needs to be coupled with the ability to embed it!

People who make suggestions of what programs to use in the meantime are being very helpful, but I am not asking for other programs. I want winamp to replace them, you see?

To the guy who made the joke about not expecting winamp to do everything (like not making my toast)...

I don't mean to be rude, but if you don't see this as an essential feature to winamps music database management, you are pretty clueless to the topic at hand. If you are happy using mediamonkey or somethign else for it, why don't you just go ahead and use mediamonkey to play your music? I paid for a pro version of winamp, and happily support it, but I'm a stickler about it keeping up with other players so I don't have to feel the need to swtich.

Can anyone give me an official reply as to why this feature gets shelved at every new release?

have not heard anything supporting that embed feature has been added

i don't embed art, but i don't begrudge the feature to others. however, there is something of a problem... how would winamp make clear to the user what art was folder based, and which embedded? right now, i can't tell from inside winamp which art came from where.

its a UI issue that needs to be solved prior to implementing the feature, imo.

from what i understand
embedded art takes preference

yes i know... but what i am saying is that if you are in winamp, and you see you have art, you can't tell from inside winamp whether it is embedded or folder based. some kind of UI indication of which is being shown to you would be nice.

ok that i understand
from this point i can only recommend you recommend this in the wishlist
since the only way i know the difference is that on the newer windows systems it shows up in the icon of the music file
but i have yet to see a internal identification within winamp

Some UI indication would be nice, but not necessary to have before implementing it. I can't imagine a scenario where this would be critical. If you have a standard organizational method, you probably know how your album art is, so I'm assuming you mean if you are going through lots of files you got from someone else.

If in doubt, you can use winamp to check very quickly. In the media library view, right click and choose "explore item folder" for the file in question. Is there a .jpg in there? If not, and the album is displaying, the image is embedded. If you see a .jpg in there and you wonder if it may still be embedded, try moving the .jpg and see if the image still displays.

You can also open your folder via windows and check by looking at the icon.

Winamp could implement the feature without the UI indication and make many users happy, even without the UI indication. But yes, it would be nice, and an obvious complementary feature. But I disagree it would need to be done first.

I also recommend never putting any music directly into your database until you have checked the album art method, if you are particular about it. It can save you a lot of headache to do it on a "as you receive the song" basis.

Still waiting to see if anyone can shed light on why this feature is seemingly ignored.

or downloaded, p2p, paid for, etc... maybe you were just messy with your own stuff.

art itself isn't critical, but the feature is necessary to save you from having to do anything else to know whats what. i think its important to know if you are replacing an embedded artwork or just superceding a folder one, before embedding a new one for example.

by the same token, when you delete art, its nice to know first if its embedded or folder based. in my usage, i'd almost always want to delete embedded art, but how would i know? (just fyi i'd save it to the folder first once if i wanted to keep it, then delete the art from the various files)

artwork can be a hidden file, and lots of users don't know this or configure windows to show hidden files. often, its ugly to do so depending on windows ver.

regardless, forone or two files, the round-a-bout way above is fine, but it should be unnecessary and its impractical for working lots of files.

lets just agree to request both.

it just isn't done yet. eventually i'm sure they'll get around to it. keep in mind each tagging system has its own way of doing it, and you want to be sure you do it for each one in a non-destructive, compatible way.

i'd also guess they haven't thought thru my UI indication either. with limited resources, they just haven't focused on this yet. personally, i think there are some huge issues outstanding right now that really need attention prior to this.

Hi everyone. Its appalling that 4 years have passed and yet the developers at Winamp have failed to include this absolute must feature to embed album art into tracks. Its as if they refuse to do it. As far as using the desktop winamp is concerned downloading and storing the album art in the music folder is fine as it shows up in winamp. But problems arise when I sync my music with my phone. No album art is synced. This is such a necessary yet trivial feature. I just dont get why it is not being included. I absolutely love winamp, always have, but this is ridiculous.

I didn't know it also embeds the art into the file.. I thought it just changed the tag information.. I'ma hafta' look that up! :)

Embedding cover art
 

Patiently waiting more than 5+ years, I too would like to add my support/desire to see this feature native in WinAmp.

I still wonder why they won't do this... In the meantime, I'm still using another software *just* to embed pictures in my files.

And the transcoding tool (verified in v5.61) is broken regarding album art: if the album art is stored as folder.jpg (or cover.jpg etc) in the same folder as the files to transcode, then the transcoder does not embed the album art inside the newly created transcoded format. Basically, the album art is lost during the process...

However if the album art is already embedded inside the file to transcode (with another software of course, as Winamp cannot do it...), then transcoding the file will keep the album art embedded inside the newly transcoded file.

not copying the external album art is not a bug, it's a feature request as the transcoder has only ever been designed to copy in-tag data which external album art files aren't covered by.

-daz

By "broken" maybe he means that embedding during transcoding was once working? I cannot verify since I'm now on the latest version.

Any movement on this yet? Or suggestions on other software that actually embed the file rather than create a seperate jpg file (WinAmp), link to a seperate file (Roxio, WinAmp 'embed' option) or create a seperate hidden file (WMA)? There seems to be some confusion over whether programs actually embed (and therefore make transportable) or not.