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Cover art in OGG/FLAC files now
Thanks to blog comments by J.B. Nicholson-Owens and Panzi, Magnatune now has cover art embedded in FLAC and OGG files. In a previous blog entry, I announced that we had album art in our MP3 and AAC file downloads but hadn't been able to do the same for FLAC and OGG files.
Support for album art varies among audio players that support FLAC and OGG files. I tested "totem" and "vlc" and both worked for me.
OGG Vorbis in totem:
FLAC in totem:
OGG Vorbis in VLC:
FLAC in VLC:
Just as with our MP3 and AAC files, I'm using a 300x300 pixel JPG as the artwork source, which is a good compromise between quality and file size.
Rhythmbox is currently crashing on startup on my Ubuntu install, and Amarok crashed X windows on me, so I wasn't able to test those two players.
-john
Posted by John Buckman on June 15, 2012 at 04:15 AM | Permalink
Comments
Hi John. Just thought I'd point out that these files may not play properly on all (especially hardware) players. In particular, ogg files with embedded cover art do not play on my (admittedly rather old) iriver T60 (the files are simply skipped over). I have no idea how widespread this is - it may just be an issue with older players, or even just my particular model.
However, once one is aware of it, it isn't really much of a problem - it can be solved by either switching to mp3's (I've tested mp3 files with cover art, and they present no problems for my T60) or by stripping the cover art from the files using some appropriate utility (e.g. vorbiscomment), but you might consider putting a warning about this in an appropriate place (say, on the download page or the FAQ), especially if this turns out to be a widespread problem.
I should also add that the particular method you are using for embedding the cover art (the COVERART tag) is unofficial and deprecated, see
http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisComment#Unofficial_COVERART_field_.28deprecated.29
Posted by: Martin Wanvik at Jun 20, 2012 5:27:58 AM
John,
As a lifetime member, it's wonderful to have the artwork embedded into the files now. This saves me the step of embedding them myself.
I have one request, if you don't mind. I'd love to see you offer Apple Lossless files now that Apple's opened the format freely. I always have to download the WAV file, create a CD from it, rip it and hope that it's in the CDDA database just so I can have a lossless version of the tracks in iTunes.
Will Apple Lossless be a download option?
Posted by: Robert Yannetta at Jul 5, 2012 12:40:33 PM
re: Will Apple Lossless be a download option?
I'd love to offer Apple Lossless format files on Magnatune, but I haven't been able to find an open source program to create them from WAV files, at least none that can run on Linux. If there is one out there, and I haven't seen it, please let me know and this could be done.
-john
Posted by: John Buckman at Jul 5, 2012 4:58:32 PM
It looks like ffmpeg is the way to go. Take a look at this, John:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=889700
Posted by: Robert Yannetta at Jul 13, 2012 7:59:59 PM
