Ask Team Vox: Adding Album Covers To Audio

Q: Is there a way to add images for audio that was uploaded from my computer or albums and books that aren't available on Amazon? -- Krypto-Bizarro

Snow angel

A:  Thanks for your question, K-B. 

First, let's talk about audio assets and what we at Vox affectionately refer to as the "Snow Angel". The Snow Angel is that little pink speaker icon that you see on a lot of audio around Vox (look at it sideways) and it means that when the person who posted it uploaded that file, we found no art in it. Many audio file formats (mp3 is what I use most often) have some degree of tag support. Embedded in the tags is information like Artist, Album, Track Name, etc. Usually, one of the supported tags is album art. If you're pretty good at managing your audio file tags, you may have already come across this tag. If you set this tag (most tagging software will let you point at a .jpg or other graphic file) before uploading your audio file to Vox, then that art will be used in graphical representations of that audio throughout Vox. No more Snow Angel!

There are many different ways to get album art in to your audio files, and the ones that work will depend on a couple of variables - most notably, your operating system. I'm mainly a Windows user and not very anti-Microsoft, so here are some ways that I usually go about adding art to my audio for Vox:

• Album art is available from lots of sources. If your files are already properly tagged with Artist and Album, then a lot of media players (I use Windows Media Player) will go out on their own to some magical site and pull down the album art. In WMP's case, I know that once the album art shows up in the player, I can go look in the directory where the audio file is on my hard drive and find some hidden .jpgs of the album art in various sizes. If you don't have a player that does this, you can also try searching for the album on Amazon or Rhapsody. In either site, when you find the album art you want, just right click and save the image. It doesn't have to be a super-high resolution version, and most of what you find on those sites will work fine.
  
• 

  Shirley Ellis
  Sometimes you don't necessarily want album art, but you want something, right? For instance, I have tons upon tons of old 60s soul and Northern Soul mp3s, which I like to post from time to time. Some of these tracks were never on albums, or were only on compilations, or their albums just don't mean much to me. In the case of soul music, I'm a 45 kind of guy. You can pretty much put any art you want in your audio file and Vox should handle it nicely. If I'm posting an old Edwin Starr or maybe a Shirley Ellis track, I'll usually just do a Google Image search for an interesting photo of the artist, and stick that in there. It's nice to see who's singing to you, right?
  
• Ok, so once you have an image in hand to go with your audio file, you need some sort of tagging program to stick them together. I like to use one named, rather intuitively, Mp3Tag. It's free (send them a donation!) and very easy to use. Simply open it up and browse to find your file. Right click the file and select "Tags...". Then, under the "Cover" section, click the little star on a file icon and you can browse to the graphic file that contains the art you want to add. Click OK to save it and upload it to Vox.
  

When you include an audio asset in a post, it's good to know that setting the size to Large will cause it to be shown with player controls on it, allowing it to be played inline from your blog or a neighborhood view, without having to open up the asset itself. This is nice if you have the space in your post and you'd like to save your readers from navigating away from whatever page they're using to view your content. One down side that I hear about from time to time, though, is that people don't realize that once they navigate off of the page they're on (to the previous page of posts, for instance) the audio will stop playing. For this reason, I often take advantage of Firefox's tabbed browsing and open up the audio asset in another tab and start it playing there. You can then switch back to the tab you're reading blogs on without interrupting the audio stream.

So there you go... some quick(ish) tips for getting your audio in to Vox and ultimately distracting the rest of us from any hope of productivity. For further reading on sharing audio with Vox, read this article in our knowledge base.  Now get to uploading!

-- Steve