Support for FLAC album art?

[Breepee]

Is this in the pipeline, or else, could it be added? Thanks! Love the program!

[Breepee]

Bump 🙂

[rpedde]

@Breepee wrote:

Bump 🙂

Sorry, didn’t even see the first one.

That’s a “can’t do”. Flacs get transcoded to .wav, which don’t have a way to embed album art. So I can’t re-add it to the wav file as I stream it.

[CCRDude]

Actually, I think its more a question if iTunes does support any way to read album art, than a question of a way, since wave files are simple RIFF files, and next to all those INFO chunks (INAM, IART, IPRD &c., see
http://www.geocities.com/smigman.geo/mci/riffmci.html), another chunk containing artwork would technically be quite simple. Maybe such a standard even already exists somewhere and just isnt known (just as real riff text metadata in wave is relatively unknown). I know of two workarounds only currently, which is either attaching a ID3v2 tag (silly since its not conform to the RIFF standard), or embedding the ID3v2 tag in a ‘tag ‘ info chunk, which might be seen as kind of a legit extension of the few existing info chunks, and which could actually contain anything that ID3v2 may contain… including cover art.

Is this worth a suggestion to Apple to support this? Not sure… it seems they already can read/write standard wave text metadata, but I’ve never checked if they even react to bug reports (hmmm… might check if they fixed the bugs I reported some months ago in their recent update).

To get to an end: there are currently two ways, one bad, one kind of acceptable, to embed album art, but without the client supporting it, they’re kind of useless 😉

[rpedde]

@CCRDude wrote:

but without the client supporting it, they’re kind of useless 😉

Well, yeah, that’s kinda what I meant, only two paragraphs less typing. 🙂

I had spent some time before looking at riff metadata, and there are some defacto standards for it, at least in the broadcasting industry, but it doesn’t look like iTunes reads them.

[CCRDude]

Well, I had the misconception that reporting iTunes bugs or feature requests to Apple would actually be getting somewhere… I now checked the bugs I reported, including one in a pure iTunes-iTunes environment where iTunes regularly skips the first N seconds of each track, and it’s still there (given that the iTunes product manager is an arrogant liar, I’m not really surprised).

[Breepee]

Ah, that’s too bad! Well, guess the only option will be when, and if, a open source ALAC encoder comes along…

BTW, there seems to be a freeware encoder around:

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?p=50839#post50839
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t42614.html

A closed source dll is all there appears to be.

[beerfan]

@rpedde wrote:

That’s a “can’t do”. Flacs get transcoded to .wav, which don’t have a way to embed album art. So I can’t re-add it to the wav file as I stream it.

FLAC does support metadata including album art.

http://flac.sourceforge.net/format.html#metadata_block

Assuming mt-daapd just streams flac files as is without transcoding and the client fully supports flac then everything should work. Of course that’s a lot of ifs.

There’s an iTunes (or more accurately quicktime) FLAC codec plugin though I’m not sure if it supports the “PICTURE” metadata and I don’t have a tag editor that supports FLAC to test it.

http://xiph.org/quicktime/download.html

A possibility for “the pipeline” is to enhance the external album art feature so that the FLAC metadata is supported so that art can be added during streaming.

[beerfan]

@beerfan wrote:

There’s an iTunes (or more accurately quicktime) FLAC codec plugin though I’m not sure if it supports the “PICTURE” metadata and I don’t have a tag editor that supports FLAC to test it.

http://xiph.org/quicktime/download.html

I just tried the plugin but it doesn’t work. The release notes say:
“FLAC – FLAC decoder and importer for Ogg FLAC (no support for native FLAC file format yet);”

Oh well, I guess we’ll get there eventually.

[rpedde]

@beerfan wrote:

@beerfan wrote:

There’s an iTunes (or more accurately quicktime) FLAC codec plugin though I’m not sure if it supports the “PICTURE” metadata and I don’t have a tag editor that supports FLAC to test it.

http://xiph.org/quicktime/download.html

I just tried the plugin but it doesn’t work. The release notes say:
“FLAC – FLAC decoder and importer for Ogg FLAC (no support for native FLAC file format yet);”

Oh well, I guess we’ll get there eventually.

And even that won’t play streamed when you *have* an ogg flac. iTunes sees a non-mp3, non-aac file and decides to try and decode it as mpeg or something rather than just tossing it quicktime and letting quicktime sort it out.

Not sure why, but I’ve tried to jam that square peg in the round iTunes hole already.

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