iTunes, MP3 Album Art and ID3 Tag Versions October 21, 2011
Posted by kevinbe71 in iTunes, MP3, Music, Winamp.add a comment
If you think iTunes is embedding all of your album art into your MP3s you may be surprised when you try play them in another player like Winamp. Here’s an explanation…
- Album art can only be stored in MP3s if they have a tag version > 2 (1.0 and 1.1 cannot have album art).
- iTunes respects your ID3 tag version and won’t change it.
- Downloaded album art doesn’t get embedded in the files.
- When you restore from an iTunes backup using the “external hard drive” method it doesn’t restore the downloaded album art, so you have to use “Get Album Artwork” again.
#2 sounds like a good thing, but if you’re not aware of this you may have the impression that the effort you’re going through is resulting in MP3s embedded with cover art… then you’ll be irritated no end to discover that the cover art just isn’t there! This problem can be rectified by changing your ID3 tag version and then updating the album art- use “Covert ID3 Tags” in iTunes for this.
Note: I was using iTunes 10.5, so the issue I noticed in #4 above may not be the case for other versions.
