FLAC Embedded Album Covers

[TheOldPresbyope]

Hi Rob,

I was able to repro the issue. Only the Doors embedded cover is displayed. I looked at the files with Mediainfo and did not see anything suspicious.

I don't have any other tools to analyze the files so maybe u can look at them with a tag editor and see if there is anything unusual with the embedded images.

-Tim

Try VLC, my favorite Swiss-Army knife, available on most platforms. It should show the image in a media file if present.

FLAC is not MP3. See https://xiph.org/flac/index.html for a discussion of its format scheme.

Regards,
Kent

Hi Kent,

Every other program I have displays the embedded image without an issue (especially VLC). I use MP3TAG to tag my MP3 and FLAC and it shows the image.

No one said MP3 and FLAC are the same. 

Thanks,
Rob

Sorry, I was in a hurry to leave and ended up with what sounds snarky when I read it now.

The point I failed to make is that FLAC has its own scheme for metadata and various editors do or do not write strictly valid entries. Some players are more lenient than others about it. I haven't explored the Zend modules which are pulled into moOde to deal with the various file types but it's possible Zend/Media/Flac.php is having heartburn over some of your files or it's returning data which moOde's coverart.php throws into the proverbial bit-bucket.

I don't have a library of FLAC files to test. I just downloaded one I found on the Interweb which VLC can play and display the coverart. moOde can also play it but not display the coverart. Similarly the very useful tool easyTAG can display its basic audio info and its textual metatags but not its coverart. I'm thinking one could use the Python mutagen module to analyze the file contents in detail, but no promises here.

In the above I use the word "coverart" loosely. FLAC has the METADATA_BLOCK_PICTURE which can contain many pictures of different "picture type". The MIME type of each picture is mandatory. yada yada yada. That's why I pointed to the spec.

Regards,
Kent

I've done some more digging on this issue.

The tool "metaflac" was most useful (it's part of the flac command line tools, available in most Linux repositories; don't know about Windows/MacOS). Here's a partial report for a flac file containing an image which displays in moOde and is found by Linux-based tools I have like easyTAG

Code:

dummy@T520 ~/Music $ metaflac --list test3.flac
METADATA block #0
 type: 0 (STREAMINFO)
 is last: false
 length: 34
 minimum blocksize: 1152 samples
 maximum blocksize: 1152 samples
 minimum framesize: 1650 bytes
 maximum framesize: 6130 bytes
 sample_rate: 96000 Hz
 channels: 2
 bits-per-sample: 24
 total samples: 3828096
 MD5 signature: e5d100c63f5188900c66b6a6a08ce2eb
METADATA block #1
 type: 4 (VORBIS_COMMENT)
 is last: false
 length: 149
 vendor string: reference libFLAC 1.2.1 win64 20080709
 comments: 5
   comment[0]: ALBUM=Bee Moved
   comment[1]: TITLE=Bee Moved
   comment[2]: ALBUMARTIST=Blue Monday FM
   comment[3]: MRAT=0
   comment[4]: ARTIST=Blue Monday FM
METADATA block #2
 type: 6 (PICTURE)
 is last: false
 length: 58388
 type: 3 (Cover (front))
 MIME type: image/jpeg
 description: image/jpeg
 width: 0
 height: 0
 depth: 0
 colors: 0 (unindexed)
 data length: 58336
 data:
   00000000: FF D8 FF E0 00 10 4A 46 49 46 00 01 01 00 00 01 ......JFIF......
   00000010:

Doing the same with the flac file I mentioned before (image displayed by VLC but not by moOde nor found in my other tools) shows no type 6 (PICTURE) metadata block is contained in the file.

Candidly, I'm mystified how the image is encoded in this file and how VLC finds it. It is not hiding, for example, in a PADDING metadata block (I looked) nor does it affect the flac decoder. I'll be interested to hear what metaflac has to say about your flac files.

As an aside, I've run across comments on the web about users getting into trouble editing flac files with MP3TAG. Caveat utilitor. As an exercise I installed v2.88a in PlayOnLinux and looked at my mystery file. It didn't find an image either, although it does in the case of flac files which contain an image encoded in a flac-metadata block type 6.

Bottom line: I have no reason to believe moOde is misbehaving with flac imagery.

Regards,
Kent