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Thursday, July 29. 2004
 Modern formats like Ogg Vorbis or MP3 do not only allow you to store you music in compressed form, they also facilitate "tagging" it, i.e., storing meta-data like the artist, the album the song is on and the year when it was released in a portion of the file called the "tag." The standard that describes tags for MP3 files is called ID3, and few people know that ID3 tags may contain images of the artist, the album's cover, or a variety of other things. (Of course, the evidence file-manager supports ID3 and will display an image from the tag instead of the generic "MP3-song" icon if one is found.)
The common response to this gem is people calling such tags bloat.
The common response to that is that 10 KB of JPG image in 6 MB of MP3 doesn't exactly constitute bloat.
Sometimes, this answer is spiced up with a little calculation illustrating how many image tags you'd have to create before stealing diskspace for even one soundfile.
The list of supported image-IDs is rather comprehensive: Other, icon (32x32 PNG), file icon, Cover (front), Cover (back), Leaflet page, Media, Lead artist/lead performer/soloist, Artist/performer, Conductor, Band/Orchestra, Composer, Lyricist/text writer, Recording Location, During recording, During performance, Movie/video screen capture, a bright coloured fish, Illustration, Band/artist logotype, and finally Publisher/Studio logotype.
So, if you ever come across the fishie in the wild, let me know! (Thanks in advance for all the fish!)
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