Album art in AIFF files

[Stormwolf]

I’ve had great sucess getting the album art to show for m4a and mp3 files by placing the appropraitely name image in the same directory. However, I can’t seem to get it to work for AIFF files. I guess this is to do with the fact AIFF doesn’t use the same tagging as the others. Is this possible, and I’m missing something, or will it be available in the future?

[rpedde]

Actually, that’s a “won’t be available”.

iTunes displays the art from the tags embedded in the song itself. For AIFF, it doesn’t support embedded art, so iTunes won’t be able to get that remotely.

For aac and mp3, the file is actually modified on the way through mt-daapd so that it looks like the art is actually embedded in the tags of the file. That’s how that works.

So short answer is no, can’t do it.

[CCRDude]

Ron gives up? Impossible 😉

If he even gets ogg, flac played… how about converting the image before streaming it? Using ImageMagick, for example ( http://www.imagemagick.org/ )? Using that to convert to a stream compatible format, it should be “possible”.

But “available” is up to Ron of course 🙂

Btw, what’s the progress on the option to use templates to define the art file name? Last week I improved my tagger application by a part that downloads all my album covers from Amazon (giving the choice to select one specific one of course, since sometimes the Amazon search isn’t very exact), and now that I have all files as “ArtistAlbum.jpg” I would love to see them of course 😉
(if not, I’ll have to find some documentation on how album art is actually stored inside ID3 tags – right now my ID3v2 code is only able to read/write the usual string/int fields – any recommendations on that?)

[rpedde]

As far as progress, I haven’t worked on anything other than the iTunes xml stuff for the last week. I’ve got tons of backlogged stuff, but I just wanted to get through the xml stuff.

That’s done, btw… playlists appear to be working. I’m going to roll that up into a nightly this afternoon.

wrt to the embedded images, the only tag types that support embedded images are mp3 and aac. Well, that’s not true, you could embed images in wma, also, or even .wav, but iTunes won’t play a wma, and won’t display images in a .wav. So you could “force” it be be embedded by converting the wav to a mp3 and embedding a picture in it (even doing it on the fly), but then you will have obviated the whole point of keeping your music in AIFF format — you are no longer in a lossless format.

As far as embedding art in mp3’s go, that’s documented here:

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt

The tag you are looking for is “APIC”.

— Ron

[CCRDude]

Thanks a lot, I was missing the MIME + PNG or JPG information 🙂

Hmmm it seems I have misunderstood the initial question: I thought AIFF would have meant the graphics format for the image, not a sound format for the music file (had AIFF = Apple Image File Format in mind instead of Audio Interchangable File Format).

[velociped]

Er, nope…You got the last two components correct, though.

AIFF is an acronym for Audio Interchange File Format. Interestingly, while it does not contain the name Apple within the expansion, the specification itself was developed by Apple back in 1989. (Coincidentally, this is the same year in which MPEG-1, the parent technology for the MP3, was introduced.) It is also the high quality, raw audio format used in commercial CD production. The specification predates the concept of ID3 tags and there has been no amendment to accommodate them.

Herman

[rpedde]

Had it *been* an image format, then yeah, it would be possible to merge them.

Now I understand your comment better.

🙂

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