Stop amarok converting custom 30k jpg cover to 200k png?

xiber

Hey, posted this on the amarok list but no resonse yet, so I'll post the question here:

How to stop amarok 1.4.1 from converting custom 30k jpg cover to 200k png?

Been using amarok for a while, so I use to have about 70 MB worth of cover art. That (to me) was way to much space for the 300 or so album covers I have, so I converted them all to 500x500 (or close) jpg's using imagemagick and gimp. Also I only set custom album covers now (no amazon), trying to keep them in the 30k to 70k jpg range. So cover art now only takes 12 MB of space.

I'm now discovering that when I set a custom cover art image, amarok 1.4.1 converts my 30k jpg into a 200k png, etc. Usually I just find the cover art filename amarok created, (example: 07c02199e4204ed4bc64136b5598b1fc), copy the 30k jpg to this location, empty the cover art cache directory, and all is fine.

But can I stop amarok for doing this? Just keep the image I set, and stop converting it?

I don't really care about the space, but when I back up my home directory, and 3/4's of the backup is cover art for only 300 covers, then that to me is just ridiculuos.

Thanks in advance,

xiber
_________________
Athlon XP-M 2600 @ 2.3 GHz OC | Abit NF7-S r2.0 | 2x512MB PC3200 | 6600GT OC | Audigy 2 | Gentoo | 2005

Athlon 64 X2 4600 @ 2.4 GHz | Asus M2N-SLI DLX | 4x1GB PC6400 | 7600GT KO | 7HD @ 3.1TB | OpenSolaris SXCE | 2007

dwinks-gentoo · n00b Joined: 25 Jul 2006 Posts: 3

Why? Stuff like this is why www.funroll-loops.org exists. How can it possibly be worth the time, effort and trouble just to worry about a few Mb of space? I have a couple of cheap seagate HDDs in my comp, all of which cost under $100 each, and hold 400Gb per...or about 4000Mb per dollar, or about 40Mb per PENNY.

Even if I valued my time at the U.S. standard minimum wage, 58Mb is worth 10 seconds of my time. I highly doubt it took you less than an hour to convert all those pictures, and likely even longer than that.

Oh and it put a time:money value on it, backing it up onto DVD-r's, which are about $25 per disc, on average, or 4400Mb per $0.25...or 176Mb per PENNY...which would make saving those 58Mb worth about 2 seconds of time.

This is nearly as bad as folks that spend 3 days re-compiling firefox and all its dependancies just to save 1/100th of a second per start-up, or folks that refuse to install a program because they use gnome/kde, and don't want to install the other DE's libraries, "wasting" perhaps an entire 100Mb...or about 2.5 CENTS worth of HDD.

Don't get me wrong, my first HDD that I bought was about $400 for 40Mb...but this is 2006, not 1986, and $400 gets a Terabyte nowadays, from just 2 500Gb seagates, on www.pricewatch.com right now for less than $200 each, with a 750Gb seagate for less than $400 if you are lacking SATA connectors.

Seriously, its not worth the trouble to worry about a couple of Mb, unless you are backing up your /home with 5 1/4" floppies.

(PS> Try setting the file permissions to read-only......

xiber · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 8:06 am Post subject:

Nice, but pay attention. As I previously stated:

dwinks-gentoo · n00b Joined: 25 Jul 2006 Posts: 3

Well, as for efficiency, perhaps Amarok uses less compressed .png files for a reason. I have over 100GiB of mp3's on my computer, and when I switch to the cover manager, it takes quite a while to read the covers on my ~110MB/s raid array. The higher the compression of the abulm covers, the longer that would take, and as it is, it takes about 15 minutes just to open them all, for the first time, on either a new OS install or new Amarok build.

Higher compression = longer decompression. This is why everything you download off the internet isn't always tar.bz2, often they are tar.gz.

I'm not sure on the decompression, but I would be willing to be that png takes less cpu cycles to decompress than jpeg.

Lastly, you didn't say whether setting the files to read-only worked for you. I would assume if the program is unable to change them, then it won't change them.

xiber · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 4:23 pm Post subject:

In that case compression / decompression isn't the only factor. You've got load time, memory usage etc. PNGs benefit is quality/patent-free/licence-free and definately not compression speed or size vs lossy jpeg. (I highly doubt if the amarok png's use zero compression).

Sure I could change permissions but...

Actually, amarok generates the image file name based on internal hash routine. I don't know what this routine is, (nor do i care to look for it), so this still has to be done by amarok and is only done once a image is added to the cover collection. So changing permissions will just prevent the album cover from being set at all, (which is NOT what I want to do).
_________________
Athlon XP-M 2600 @ 2.3 GHz OC | Abit NF7-S r2.0 | 2x512MB PC3200 | 6600GT OC | Audigy 2 | Gentoo | 2005

Athlon 64 X2 4600 @ 2.4 GHz | Asus M2N-SLI DLX | 4x1GB PC6400 | 7600GT KO | 7HD @ 3.1TB | OpenSolaris SXCE | 2007

01mf02 · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 8:14 pm Post subject:

I would say that Amarok is probably programmed that way and if you want it not to generate PNGs, the only ways would be a) to wait until a developer does it or b) to do it yourself.