Thursday, August 23, 2007
Embedded Album Art: Microsoft Doesn't Seem to Get It
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
I'm a very visual person, especially when it comes to music (how's that for a strange statement?). When I'm deciding what music to listen to, I tend to use Windows Explorer and browse through thumbnails images of my album folder rather than use the text list inside Windows Media Player. There are probably a lot of people like me, because Windows Media Player 11 has an album art view that accomplishes the same purpose (ditto for iTunes).
The Windows Media Player 11 approach to album art is very limited though - it creates a folder, and drops a few JPEGs into that folder. The album art is associated with that folder, not the files inside it. This presents several problems, namely that once you remove the songs from the folders, you have no more album art. Album art inside folders makes for some spectacularly messy instances as well - when I enabled pictures in WMP10, and let it scan away, it picked up an extra 15,000 or so images, all album art. My list of photos should be of photos, but because Windows Media Player doesn't have any threshold for image file size (it does for audio and video), it picks up every single image. My Xbox 360 had the same problem - when I browse photos over Windows Media Connect, it picks up all my music album art, making for a confusing mess. Here's an example of how the current system makes for a sloppy state of affairs.
Imagine if metadata about a song or album was stored in an external XML file. You'd have to keep the song within the same folder as the XML file to have any information about it beyond the file name, and if you moved that song to another folder, you would lose your ratings, lyrics, and everything else inside the metadata file. Sounds ridiculous, right? It is, yet that's exactly the same scenario Microsoft considers acceptable when it comes to album art and music files.
Because Windows Media Player 11 on the desktop will scale down album art to fit in the player window (lame!), having high-res album art is a waste. After a lot of trial and error, I've decided that 600 x 600 pixels is a reasonable middle ground. It's big enough to have a great experience in Media Center when looking at the album art view, it's big enough to look good in WMP on the desktop, but not so big that it causes problems. The resulting JPEGs are in the 50KB to 150KB range depending on the complexity of the image.
The Windows Media Player 11 approach to album art is very limited though - it creates a folder, and drops a few JPEGs into that folder. The album art is associated with that folder, not the files inside it. This presents several problems, namely that once you remove the songs from the folders, you have no more album art. Album art inside folders makes for some spectacularly messy instances as well - when I enabled pictures in WMP10, and let it scan away, it picked up an extra 15,000 or so images, all album art. My list of photos should be of photos, but because Windows Media Player doesn't have any threshold for image file size (it does for audio and video), it picks up every single image. My Xbox 360 had the same problem - when I browse photos over Windows Media Connect, it picks up all my music album art, making for a confusing mess. Here's an example of how the current system makes for a sloppy state of affairs.
Imagine if metadata about a song or album was stored in an external XML file. You'd have to keep the song within the same folder as the XML file to have any information about it beyond the file name, and if you moved that song to another folder, you would lose your ratings, lyrics, and everything else inside the metadata file. Sounds ridiculous, right? It is, yet that's exactly the same scenario Microsoft considers acceptable when it comes to album art and music files.
Because Windows Media Player 11 on the desktop will scale down album art to fit in the player window (lame!), having high-res album art is a waste. After a lot of trial and error, I've decided that 600 x 600 pixels is a reasonable middle ground. It's big enough to have a great experience in Media Center when looking at the album art view, it's big enough to look good in WMP on the desktop, but not so big that it causes problems. The resulting JPEGs are in the 50KB to 150KB range depending on the complexity of the image.
