Storage and Attachment of Album Cover Art

I sure wish that the images for CD covers on albums were stored as embedded information within each MP3 instead of as separate files in the directory. If you really want to start thinking of your MP3 collection like your old-school CD collection (can you believe I just used “old-school” and CD collection in the same sentence?) then you need to allow people to easily browse through their album covers and potentially even the inside liner information as images or text in a file. Embedding this in the MP3 file would be great so you wouldn’t have multiple files to worry about for each album.

The obvious problem with this is that you’d have duplicate information as the album cover image and liner information would be stored in each separate MP3 track’s file. Potentially ballooning the storage space needed unnecessarily. However, with storage getting as cheap as it is I can’t imagine it becoming that big of a deal.

Most of these image files hover around the 3KB mark. So even on a 10 track album you’re looking at a minimal file size addition compared to the actual MP3 files themselves.