I'm not entirely sure this is the best area for this, but none of the forums directly seem to fit the topic (since it's not really iTunes related) so here goes...
I finally got around to embedding all the artwork for all my 5000+ songs and 400+ albums (and 400+ movies for that matter) and I thought this would make artwork a given across most platforms (Windows Media Player doesn't apparently read embedded artwork so I guess not there; simple I don't use it). To the point, I've got a Nokia phone that has a fairly nice media player in it. It can play MP3, AAC (except encrypted and lossless) and WMA files. I thought it'd be nice to use sometimes at work with a headphone adapter instead of having to drag my iPod Touch around to get scratched or dropped or whatever and so I added a 4GB mini-SD card for $6 and bought a headphone adapter. To my surprise, I noticed album artwork appear for a couple of songs. After I finished embedding all my artwork, I thought great, now I'll have artwork appear for any song. That's true. It does appear and that's nice, but I also noticed that now when I turn on the phone, it takes like 2.5 minutes before it gets to the main screen where I can make calls instead of 20 seconds or so. Well, that's a real problem if I turn the phone on (it's a 1st gen 3G so it's a battery hog and I tend to leave it off when I don't need it) and I have to wait so darn long before I can make a call. The only reason I figure the start up time increased so much is now it has all those artwork images embedded. When it does come up it'll then say it's scanning the music library every single time I boot up (like anything has changed since the last time when it was never removed) and that'll be another 2 minutes before it can play a song. So it's like 4 minutes from power on to being able to play a song. I might as well forget about ever turning it off in this state and heaven forbid if I do turn it off and have to use the phone in a hurry.
What I'm curious about is whether anyone has noticed similar delays in various music players (hardware or software) after embedding artwork. Is this just a bad software player design or is this rather typical for many players? Am I better off stripping out the artwork for the files I plan to use in my phone? I'm not sure if that's even easy to do without ripping all tag data out. Basically, I'm pretty disappointed that just adding artwork slows everything down so much. You'd think it'd only have to load that extra information when the song is actually playing, not slow it all down just turning it on....
I finally got around to embedding all the artwork for all my 5000+ songs and 400+ albums (and 400+ movies for that matter) and I thought this would make artwork a given across most platforms (Windows Media Player doesn't apparently read embedded artwork so I guess not there; simple I don't use it). To the point, I've got a Nokia phone that has a fairly nice media player in it. It can play MP3, AAC (except encrypted and lossless) and WMA files. I thought it'd be nice to use sometimes at work with a headphone adapter instead of having to drag my iPod Touch around to get scratched or dropped or whatever and so I added a 4GB mini-SD card for $6 and bought a headphone adapter. To my surprise, I noticed album artwork appear for a couple of songs. After I finished embedding all my artwork, I thought great, now I'll have artwork appear for any song. That's true. It does appear and that's nice, but I also noticed that now when I turn on the phone, it takes like 2.5 minutes before it gets to the main screen where I can make calls instead of 20 seconds or so. Well, that's a real problem if I turn the phone on (it's a 1st gen 3G so it's a battery hog and I tend to leave it off when I don't need it) and I have to wait so darn long before I can make a call. The only reason I figure the start up time increased so much is now it has all those artwork images embedded. When it does come up it'll then say it's scanning the music library every single time I boot up (like anything has changed since the last time when it was never removed) and that'll be another 2 minutes before it can play a song. So it's like 4 minutes from power on to being able to play a song. I might as well forget about ever turning it off in this state and heaven forbid if I do turn it off and have to use the phone in a hurry.
What I'm curious about is whether anyone has noticed similar delays in various music players (hardware or software) after embedding artwork. Is this just a bad software player design or is this rather typical for many players? Am I better off stripping out the artwork for the files I plan to use in my phone? I'm not sure if that's even easy to do without ripping all tag data out. Basically, I'm pretty disappointed that just adding artwork slows everything down so much. You'd think it'd only have to load that extra information when the song is actually playing, not slow it all down just turning it on....