Display embedded album art for m4a (AAC) files

I don't know about foobar, but I do hope this feature gets added soon so that album art that is visible in iTunes and on iPods is visible in Songbird.

Yeah Stevo, you are right itunes doesn't embed it, I just did that myself through mp3tag, as it suited a particular situation for a folder of my music. However iTunes displays my embedded album art, just like it would its own (As does foobar).
I don't think adam, it would particularly give you album art on the ipod??
I think iTunes copies my embedded album art out of the files and puts it in its own file structure when I play each song anyway (Well I can see jpg files being made in the itunes folder anyway in that situation).

If you put a copy of your album artwork in the album folder (assuming your albums are organised into separate folders) and call it "folder" then songbird seems to assign it to the m4a tracks.

You don't need to re-find all your album art work you can 'de-embed' it (not sure if that's the right terminology) from the M4A's themselves. I'm doing this using mediamonkey --> where you click properties -->album art -->Save as etc.

After attempting to do this with my 2300 album library (about 1/3 of which is m4A) I have realised that this isn't a solution as it would take me something near forever to complete. I'm giving up unless anyone knows of a handy automated way to do this?

Please sort proper m4a support out.

Hi Joe KS,

That is a good idea as a temporary fix until Songbird supports the embedded album art in .m4a files.

I think I have found a solution to your problem. I use a great little app called Mp3tag that will export the album art out of each file and rename it to whatever you like, wherever you like. I also use it for its main use to tag and embed album art in all my files and clean up the tags.
I have used it to export the album art for many albums in separate folders like the situation you describe above.

It will only work however if each album is in a separate folder (more then likely like this anyway).

IMPORTANT Try it on a couple of folders first just to be sure, you should really back up your music just to be super safe! But I have never had any problems, and it doesn't write anything to the music files.
I just don't want to ruin your collection!

- Just search in your music folder for any *.m4a files and drag those into the Mp3tag window, once it is installed.
- Select them all.
- Right click on that selection. Go to Convert > Actions...
- Click the "New" action button on the right (a little star icon)
- Name action, something like "Export art"
- Box will go empty, click "New" button again
- In the drop down box that appears select "Export cover to file"
- Type "folder" in the resulting box (You can use a path to a folder, or use artist, or song name strings here as well, but to get it to work with the songbird thing we just use "folder") It will append the file extension automatically
- Press OK, OK, and tick the check mark next to the action you just created "Export art" if you named it that. Un-tick any others
- Press OK one last time. It will give you an info message when done
- In the folders of all your m4a album art you will have a image called "folder"!

Hopefully that should satisfy songbird as you describe.

Mp3Tag link:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

Its a great little program, sure the guy wouldn't mind a donation if you feel its worth it! :-)

Hope it works out for you!

It works for me see this image:


You need to rescan the folder to get it to work. To do this you first need to remove the folder. This seems to be one area where songbird needs improving as there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this.

My music is all on an external harddrive. So I do it by turning the drive off, then use the exorcist plug-in (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/216) which (since the drive if off) sees all the folders as ghosts. I use it to remove the folders. Then I use import media to rescan the folders.

Hope this works for you.

Any idea when support for images in .m4 (AAC) files is coming?

I found this very annoying as well. I spent hours and hours sorting out all my cover art images only to find that they don't show in my favorite music player. I can't imagine this would be very hard to add, why hasn't it been added yet?

Well. Ihave already over 500CDs in AAC, so please don't tell me to use MP3. I also have about 600CDs in MP3, so that's not a solution.

This really should be possible to be imported to songbird automatically. I'm not a software engineer but just think about it. Guys like me who are annoyed by iTunes giving Songbird a try just to find out that 50% of the Cover-Art is missing (depending on your library of course). Next logical reaction would be to uninstall Songbird and go back to iTunes.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the concept and looking at the development of Songbird has taken the last 2 years it's incredible.

But automatic and correct Album Art-Import is a must.

My whole library is M4A and songbird not being able to display the artwork which is embedded in each of my songs is a major factor in the software not being my sole music library manager.

I hope this can be added very soon. (I believe hopefully in 1.3?)

I would also like my voice to be added to the chorus of people asking for this functionality to be included. I spent quite some time using Media Monkey to update my entire library (close to 7000 songs) to include album art, and am disappointed to find that Songbird fails to read the album art from the small selection of M4A files I have.

Whilst the majority of my library is in MP3, it's not viable to convert the M4A files to MP3 because I do not have lossless sources for these files and thus a lossy to lossy conversion would result in deterioration of audio quality.

It's a shame, because I was quite looking forward to giving Songbird another try, as it really has come on in leaps and bounds since I first used it, but I guess I once again have to put it aside to come back to later.

M4A Album Art, Album Artist, and metadata writing support is coming in 1.3 (coming real soon)
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Releases...

yeay hurry please

So is there a release date yet?
I somewhere read that 1.4 is making good progress and might be released before 1.3 (meaning 1.3 would be skipped). Is that true?

Yes, we all are patient, but this feature really is a must. And will make this software usable again for a broader audience.

Keep it up!

@ Hop Hop,

You can try the latest build here: http://developer.songbirdnest.com/bui...
(the only thing broken is MTP support)