iTunes Embedding Album Art FAIL!

[Trainwreck707]

I just embedded album art in a bunch of AACs and noticed that the files sizes are increasing by .4 mb greater that the size of the album art. This only happens when embedding art into multiple files—adding art to individual files seem to work correctly.

I just took a 16 track album that had art embedded at the same time. I deleted all of the art and the added it to each file individually. The size of each file decreased by .4 mb! I then deleted the art and added it to the files as a group, resulting in each file growing by .4 mb.

Can someone confirm this? If this album has an extra 6.4 mb, I must have several gigabytes of wasted space.

 

[GGJstudios]

If you want to add album art but want to save space, just add the art to the first song in the album. The album will still display the art in iTunes, but each song won't have a copy of it. Or you could add a lower resolution image, that won't take up so much space. Personally, I prefer having high-quality artwork on all songs in the album. Drive space is cheap.

 

[Trainwreck707]

I wan't the art to be embedded and don't care about increasing the file size relative to the album cover. But embedding a .2 mb cover into a group of AACs causes their size to increase by .6 mb.

.4 mb x 12 (avg tracks/album) = 4.8 mb
4.8 mb x 1000 albums = 4.8 gb of wasted space per thousand albums.

This seems like a bug, and that wasted space is going to be very difficult to reclaim.

Edit: The filesize increase is not exactly .4 mb, but varies between files. I can't find any relation to the added album art—it's not doubled (like in this post at apple support).

 

[Trainwreck707]

I just took a folder with 7 albums in it and deleted all embedded artwork. I then embedded the same .jpp's by dragging them into the box in the lower left corner rather than choosing "get info" for the entire album and dropping it into the artwork box.

Before deleting art that was embedded by itunes using the "get info" method, the folder was 617.4 mb. After re-embedding art, the folder is now 590.6 mb. So, iTunes added an extra 26.8 mb when using "get info".

 

[Trainwreck707]

The answer is...

When you select "Get Info" for a group of tracks and drag album art into the Artwork box, iTunes converts the image to a PNG before embedding it, which are quite a bit larger than jpg's.

If you highlight tracks and drag art to the box in the lower left (without selecting "Get Info"), iTunes embeds the art in it's original format.