How to tell if my mp3s have embedded artwork?

[Max Dread]

Hi all

I loaded a bunch of albums onto my iPod Classic using Foobar's iPod Manager (foo_dop). The mp3s on my PC do NOT have artwork embedded. Rather, there is a cover.jpg file per album stored in the folder along with the mp3s.

Everything is displaying fine on the iPod, so there is no issue as such. I am just trying to save as much space on the iPod as possible and so want to make sure that foo_dop did not embed the artwork whilst doing the transfer.

Is there any way I can check for sure?

[If it helps to know, in the preferences for foo_dop, I have "Add artwork to files sent to iPod" ticked. In source script I have "cover". The two items below this are unticked.]

Cheers

Max

 

[Max Dread]

And just to add, on my iPod I have the following sizes in the Artwork folder:

ArtworkDB - 482kB
F1055_1.ithmb - 24MB
F1060_1.ithmb - 150MB
F1061_1.ithmb - 4.51MB


All of the jpegs on my PC hard drive total 34.5MB.

So now I'm not too sure what's going on!

 

[cjmnews]

File->New->Smart Playlist
Has Artwork is false
Media Kind is Music
Name the playlist Missing art

All the songs in there will have no art work.

 

[Max Dread]

File->New->Smart Playlist
Has Artwork is false
Media Kind is Music
Name the playlist Missing art

All the songs in there will have no art work.

Hi there

Thanks for responding but unfortunately that all means nothing to me! Are those instructions for iTunes? If so, that could explain things.... I don't have
iTunes installed and would rather not install it.

But all I really want to know is why the total amount of "artwork" files on the iPod amount to roughly 180MB, when at the same time the artwork for these same albums on my Hard Drive amounts to 35MB in total.

Cheers

 

[Cold Irons]

Another approach: manually copy some of the song files off of the iPod (put the iPod in disk mode, turn on "display hidden files" in explorer, locate & copy the mp3 files onto your computer).

Use a stand-alone tag editing utility (something like Tag&Rename or MP3Tagger) and look at the files to see if they have embedded artwork. If so, your "foo_dop" is embedding the artwork in the files.

Given the fact that the iPod does display the artwork, either it is embedding the artwork, or it is building an external database of artwork thumb pics to go with the albums. I would suspect it is the latter; foo_dop is probably doing the same as iTunes does when you get the artwork from iTunes instead of embedding it in each file - it builds a database of the artwork to go with each song.

Finally, keep in mind that 180Mb on a 160Gb iPod is still only maybe about 0.2% of your iPod's storage...not worth worrying about.

 

[Max Dread]

Thanks Cold Irons. I did as you suggested and can confirm that the audio files do NOT have embedded artwork.

Perhaps it is something to do with how foo_dop works and makes the transfer. I will have to look into that. But just to be clear, I do not use iTunes at all. I rip the CDs using dbPoweramp, and as part of the rip process I choose my own artwork from the internet. Each jpg is saved as "cover.jpg" in the album folder, and is restricted in size to 320x320; with a maximum file size of 50kb.

Fair point RE the size savings. TBH, I am somewhat of a perfectionist though and don't want space to be taken up unnecessarily. I like to know and understand these things too! Plus, the iPod is only just over a quarter full. So if it continues to go like this, when it is full it will have 600MB of potentially unnecessary space taken up by the artwork. It's not a huge amount, but it would still mean extra space for 10-15 albums if it was not there....

Many thanks