How to decrease the tagsize after deleting coverart Options

[Lupercus]

I just received some FLAC files that had coverart embedded. The .jpg files that were embedded were however way too big: about 4-6 MB per FLAC!
MP3Tag took ages to read these huge tags in the total of 230 files, probably because of these huge tagsizes. So I deleted all coverart via the "extended tags".

However, the tagsize is still indicated to be between 4 and 6 MB per FLAC, even after the deletion of all coverart ...

Is there any way decrease the tagsize ? I already deleted all tags and pressed "undo", without any result.

[Lupercus]

After some searching I found that apparently the space in the FLAC used by an embedded image is indeed "padded" when removing the image.

So the question seems to be how to remove this huge padding in the picture metadata block.
I saw that perhaps this could be done with Metaflac, if I understand correctly using the switches: "--remove --block-type=PADDING --dont-use-padding"
Can this be made to work only on the picture metadata?

Alternatively, I saw that there was also a switch "--remove-all --dont-use-padding"
But would this also delete the normal tags such as "title" and I'm not quite sure whether this would also remove existing padding ...

Anyway, this is becoming a bit too technical for me, does someone have any experience with this?

This post has been edited by Lupercus: Sep 4 2009, 20:37

[Lupercus]

Sorry to keep answering myself, but I found a solution via metaflac used in a batchfile, that seems to work.

@echo off
title Reduce padding in FLAC - all files in directory
for %%i in (*.flac) do (
echo Removing padding from "%%~ni.flac" ...
"<full-path-to>\metaflac.exe" --remove --block-type=PADDING --dont-use-padding "%%~ni.flac"
if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto error
echo Adding 4096 bytes of padding ...
"<full-path-to>\metaflac.exe" --add-padding=4096 "%%~ni.flac"
if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto error
echo -- Done
echo.
)
echo.
echo -- Padding reduced
goto end
:error
echo.
echo ---- ERROR REDUCING PADDING ---- batch process stopped
:end
echo.
pause
exit

Save this as f.i. "ReduceFLACPadding.bat" and place in the right-context-menu folder of explorer. This will reduce any oversized padding in all FLACs in the directory to a standard 4096 bytes, leaving the existing tags intact.

This post has been edited by Lupercus: Sep 5 2009, 14:03

[jorgensen]

I also had audio files with huge cover art, and hopped I could find help here, but not much.
Turned out that J. River Media Center do the job easily, and version 12 is free.
However do not scan to update the library, as Media Center will embed the cover art by default.

This post has been edited by jorgensen: Oct 25 2009, 09:37