Album artwork

[Peter Orr]

Having just converted my most of my .m4a music files on my B2 to FLAC via an Apple music converter app, I have lost most of the cover artwork files associated with each album, this being embedded in the encoding process.

What is the easiest way to obtain the artwork jpg files again?  I hope I don't have to find and download the relevant album jpg file and manually import them one by one to the Brennan.

Is there an easier, more automated way? I have about 1400 albums to reassign covert to.

Peter

[Mark Fishman]

I'm going to assume that the m4a files you converted were "protected" (old iTunes) files, because there's no point in converting them to FLAC otherwise -- they get bigger but don't get any better, and the B2 is supposed to be able to play unprotected m4a files.

 - What converter app did you use? Did the converter embed the art, or was it embedded already?

 - You say you have lost "most of" the cover art -- you still have some of it?

The B2 will not read or know about embedded artwork. It looks for a separate file, with extension .jpg, in the album directory. If you have artwork that is embedded what you need to do is extract it. On a Windows computer the application mp3tag will do this; I don't know what to suggest for a Mac.

[Peter Orr]

Thank you Mark for your feedback.

Yes, I want to keep my Apple Music files in case I choose to stop paying for access to more Apple downloads, and also I want to be able to play them in the car, which will play FLAC files but not m4a files.

I still have some cover art because I did manually download a few jpgs which now sit alongside the FLACS in the album folder. I also have yet to convert a few m4a files and the covert is embedded which is standard for Apple music downloads, but I will be converting everything to FLAC soon.

I'll do some digging and see if it's possible to extract the coverart from m4a files on a mac like you can under Windows.

So what you're saying is that it's not possible to get the B2 to search for relevant artwork for its internal FLAC files, like it does when you burn a CD. That's a pity.

Peter

[Mark Fishman]

The B2 used to be able to "add" artwork for albums that were already ripped, but it used Amazon for that and Amazon has stopped supplying album art in that way. So maybe there is no current way.

In my experience, getting album art "after the fact" on any platform depends on being able to identify the original album, which usually means having all (or most) of the CD tracks in one directory in the correct sequence. It can be tricky. But if you already have embedded art then extracting it should be no big deal.

mp3tag used to run under Wine on a mac, but with the demise of 32-bit support Florian has been developing a native Mac version. It's in beta at the moment; take a look at https://mp3tag.app/

VLC might be able to do it also but you'll have to play the files to see the art, and then find the cache directory that it puts all the art into.

[Rik]

Musicbrainz still finds some.

[Peter Orr]

I really want to avoid having to manually search for cover art for FLAC conversions on the B2 where the original file had the artwork embedded, so now lost.

So I am thinking perhaps of using Shazzam which can search your music libraries and present the cover artwork automatically. Maybe I could do a screen grab of the Shazzam artwork without having to enter each album name in a separate Google search and download operation?

Anybody tried this?

Peter