Help! Cover art eating too much memory
I just got a 5G video ipod and wanted to add cover art for all the songs in my library. I grabbed enough jpeg's off of the internet for about 80 of my 1600 songs, and dragged the files from my desktop to the drop-zone in iTunes. I updated my ipod to make sure everything was working the way it should. Well, it worked fine; the ipod updated with the cover art and the right album covers appear when they should.
The problem is this: I lost almost a half a gig of memory just adding the cover art for about 80 songs. By my rough calculations, if I add cover art for all of my songs, I am going to lose more than 8 gigs of memory adding cover art for just 10 gigs worth of music.
I must be doing something wrong. There is no way people are adding cover art to their ipods when the cover art consumes as much memory as the song itself.
My version of iTunes is 6.0.5 and I am running it on Mac OS 10.2.8. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
[978 byte] By [
cberube] at [2007-11-11 22:09:06]
# 1 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
Where are you getting the album art from? what is the size of the files and resolution of the album art?
# 2 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
All of the art I got from either discogs or wikipedia. I did not check the file size and resolution on all, but just looking at a random file, I got a the cover for Miss Kittin's "A Bugged Out Mix" from discogs, and it is 12 kB. I don't know what the resolution is.
# 3 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
When you look at the iPod in iTunes, under the image that shows the used space. What is the size of each area: Audio, Videos, photos, others?
Adding Album art will add a certain amount of space to each file you add it to (increasing audio area), then on transfer to the iPod, an artwork database is made and that goes under "other" For my 4000 some songs, my other is around 600MB (for me this also includes my calendars, games and contacts).
What you describe does not seem to make sense unless there were some transfer issues.
If you are on manual update, and you added the artwork in iTunes and then transfered the song to the iPod, it made a duplicate and might explain the increase in space lost. Are you on manual update?
For more information see: Photo Storage on the iPod - The Gory Details (http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?t=66435) Which includes talk of album art.
# 4 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
Thanks for replying. I checked out the provided link, and it does not seem from the article that these files should be consuming so much memory.
I am away from my computer, so I can't really answer your first question except to say that I do not recall that my (outdated) version of iTunes provides a breakdown of how my space is used. I think it just gives one number for the total space used and another number for the total free space.
Like I said, the transfer seemed to work okay. I have iTunes set to update automatically when I connect the ipod to my computer, and that was how I added the artwork. I just checked my ipod and I am not seeing multiple listings for the songs on which I added the cover art. So, if you are suggesting that the transfer created duplicate audio files when the ipod updated, it is not apparent to me from looking at the display on my ipod, and I do not recall seeing duplicate listings when it was connected to iTunes. If the update did create duplicate audio files on the ipod, how would I know?
# 5 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
If you use automatic update, then the chances of doubles is pretty much nil. It's a bug in manual transfer...
You are right iTunes 6 doesn't break down the iPod contents the way iTunes 7 does.
I would check your iTunes when you get home. Does it appear that space in iTunes and on your hard drive has increased exponentially as it did on the iPod? If not, I would recommend a restore and resync. This may bring things back into order. There is a chance your iPod is plauged with "ghost files" taking up extra space...
That's the only other thing I can think of.
# 6 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
Okay, thanks, I will check that. I did not think to notice what the used space in iTunes was doing; I just checked what was going on with the iPod, so I really won't have a point of reference. Maybe I could add a few more album covers just to see what happens with the memory in iTunes.
I don't know if this is important but...when the iPod was updating, the update was as slow and, for all appearances in iTunes, looked no different than an update to add new songs from my library to my iPod from scratch (that is, the songs to which I added artwork were "x"ed in my library and then "copied" to my iPod, even though the audio files were already there on the iPod).
Anyway, just so I understand: Are you saying the problem is not the size of the jpeg files themselves? In other words, I should not have to do anything to the jpeg files to make them smaller (like, for example, figure out how to make lower resolution images from the files I'm getting, etc.)?
Again, thanks for helping.
# 7 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
Whenever a major change is made to a file in iTunes, the file is erased from the iPod and the copy from iTunes is then transfered over. So you essentally had to transfer 80 songs back to the iPod.
As far as weather the size of the JPEGs is the problem this would be hard to tell. Though the size of the JPEG doesn't necessarily affect the size the artwork database on the iPod, it might affect the size of the actual audio file once it is embedded in it. So it's hard to say if you don't have a reference. You might want to check the size of the audio file before and after embedding your artwork.
a 12kb album art though is not all that bad. 300x300 resolution is pretty good for most album artwork, though you want to use whatever is best for your own eyes.
To see how the album artwork is affecting space on your iPod, you could also deselect "include album artwork" and resync and see how the size on the iPod reflects after you do that and with it selected.
# 8 Re: Help! Cover art eating too much memory
Okay, I'll try all of your suggestions when I get home. Thank you again for your assistance and patience.
