[Digitalbath3737]

I recently read on Ilounge that high resolution art work was mostly a waste of space.

Quote:

The iPod stores and displays album artwork in two resolutions -- one on the normal "Now Playing" screen, and one on the album artwork view (shown by pressing the select button from the "Now Playing" screen). Album artwork is stored on the iPod in the \iPod_Control\Artwork directory. There should be three files in this directory -- the artwork database file (presumably an index of which artwork belongs to which song), and two ITHMB files. These ITHMB files store the exact same artwork, in the two different resolutions. The larger file (F016 on my iPod) stores the 140x140 version used in the album artwork screen, and the smaller one (F1017 on my iPod) stores the 56x56 version used in the "Now Playing" screen. The resolutions in this case were fairly easy to figure out on the assumption that all album artwork images are perfectly square. Since each new album image added to the iPod increased these file sizes by 39,200 bytes and 6,272 bytes, respectively, it was easy enough to calculate the actual resolution by dividing these numbers by the colour depth and then taking the square root of the result. Note that the album artwork also technically lives in one other place on your iPod -- within the MP3/AAC files themselves. The iPod doesn't use these images or care about them in any way, so they're technically wasted space. In fact, iTunes doesn't touch these images, so they're left in whatever size you saved them into the file in. In other words, if you're using high-resolution album artwork, you're losing even more space on your iPod.

Is this true for for all DAPs? Do any of them use the art embedded in the file?

 

[Gautama]

ZVM does but it displays it. Ive got tons of space, I dont care

 

[MonkeysAteMe]

I think all that album art is embedded into the Id3 tags, so if you have it attached to your mp3's then even if your player can't display album art, the information is still there.

That's how I understand it.

 

[Jubei]

Foobar reads album art files in the same folder as the mp3s (or you can specify location), so image files don't have to be embedded into the actual mp3s. Personally, I dislike embedding the album art into the ID3 tags.

The ZVM acts the same way, actually. But I normally don't transfer the image files over to save a little bit of space. I do use Creative's ZVM software to load songs though.