why does iTunes add 200KB to my songs when i add CD Cover Artwork?

spiers69

Hey everyone,

i want to know why it is that iTunes adds 200KB to all my songs when i add CD Cover Artwork to them? Especially when many of them are from the same CD and share the same picture? Why can't i just store the picture once somewhere on my HD, and then iTunes recieves the artwork from that file, for all the songs? Instead of making a dozen-or-so copies of the same JPEG??



Can anyone help me, it seems so illogical, and it's using precious room on my iPod Mini.

ipodandimac

aliasing album art would be useful for some things, but for people with ipod photos, the hard drive would be spinning more than usual to look up both the next song, then find its appropriate album and pic. i think a good solution would be having a checkbox for artwork in the ipod prefs of itunes.

gene clean

Because the artwork is stored individually in every song. That way, if you decide to move your songs from one HD to the other, you don't have to search for every artwork of every album and move that one to that HD too - or even a different PC. You just move the songs from HD -> HD or Mac -> X-PC and the Artwork is there. No searching, no nothing.

spiers69

ok. fair enough. But why 200KB? The jpeg files are usually about 20KB which isn't too bad...

gene clean

Well, I'm not sure why it's 200kb and not less, as it should be for a small jpeg picture.



However, this might be one scenario: iTunes converts your jpeg artwork to some high-quality format en route and only then adds it to the song. Just a speculation.

qchem

Has anyone looked into how album artwork is stored? It may actually be rolled into the aac file - I could see this taking something like 200K. I'm just speculating though.