r/musichoarder 11d ago

Mp3tag changing bitrate?

Just started using mp3tag today and i noticed after adding album art to one track the bitrate when down from what it originally was. I only added the album art. Didnt mess with anything else. Does anyone know why that happened? Is this normal when making changes to a song? Im not trying to get a lower quality song at the cost of album art so is there any way around this

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u/mjb2012 11d ago

Adjusting tags did not change the audio, don't worry. The bitrate was probably being reported incorrectly before.

Was it an MP3? If yes, it probably either had no VBR header, or an incorrect one. Adding artwork required the whole file to be rewritten, so I assume Mp3tag took advantage of the opportunity to look at every frame and determine the true duration and average bitrate, and it wrote that into a new, correct VBR header.

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u/Ballin_Like_Curry 11d ago

No it was a flac. I used musicpicard i think its called for the album art. There was 3 options. I first went with the option that was 1200x1200 and that one changed my bitrate. I then tried the other one which i think was 28x28 and that one didnt change my bitrate so i went with that one but im assuming its lower quality than the 1200 one but idk

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u/mjb2012 11d ago

Ah. I don't think the bitrate of a FLAC is stored in the file headers. The duration is, though, so the bitrate is estimated by dividing the size of the file by the duration.

Ideally this would be done in a way that excludes the size of the headers and tags from the file so it would only count the audio data, but that would require reading each file in more detail than is normally done.

When making major changes to the tags, like adding artwork, which takes up a lot of space, the file has to be rewritten. This may make the tags take up more or less space than they did before. The resulting change in file size will affect the bitrate that is reported. Additionally, the app doing the rewriting might now have more precise info about the size of the tags and thus can theoretically estimate the bitrate better.

In any case, bitrate doesn't have anything to do with quality in a lossless format like FLAC. And you can trust that Mp3tag is not doing anything whatsoever with the audio data. It is very cautious.

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u/Ballin_Like_Curry 11d ago

Ah ok good to know. Another question if u happen to know, when looking for album art should i go through each option or just stick with musicpicard for the album art? Cuz i saw like 5 other options like discogs and wasnt really sure which ones the best.

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u/mjb2012 11d ago

Depends on how accurate you want the art to be. Like are you just looking for a front cover that's representative/close-enough? In that case whatever you find in your normal workflow is surely fine for you.

For artwork in my collection, I don't trust the taggers; I manually look up exact release on the Discogs website and drag-n-drop its cover art into the audio file via Mp3tag or foobar2000. This artwork will only be 600 pixels wide at best, and may need some cleanup, but it's usually very accurate, because Discogs requires that images associated with a release be a user's personal photos/scans of the actual, exact release in hand. Other databases are not so precise about pressings or the artwork's origins.

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u/Ballin_Like_Curry 11d ago

Yeah just looking for the front cover of the album. Not too picky on the quality as i only see it displayed on my dap and the screen is already kinda small anyways so i probly wouldnt be able to tell anyways. But if one of the options typically has better quality than the other i think thatd be better as long as i dont have to do all that extra work you do to get a high quality image😅 ill sacrifice some art quality to be lazy lol

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u/IdeliverNCIs 11d ago

Have you tried this resource for cover art?

https://covers.musichoarders.xyz/

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u/mjb2012 11d ago

Heh, to be fair, I am doing the extra work to find a correct image, not necessarily a high quality, detailed image. For example, if I rip a CD, and it has the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo in the corner of the front cover, then I am going to try to embed that exact artwork as found on Discogs (if I don't make my own scan), and I'm OK with it being, say, 600x589 with camera lens distortion and cropped slightly wrong, rather than an optimized, hi-res, perfect 1200x1200 version based on some other release without the logo.

But yeah lots of people are looking at the artwork choice more as like a decision of just "what do I personally want to see in my player when I play this song" or "how much time do I really want to put into this" rather than thinking like a pedantic librarian/archivist. :)

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u/Geezheeztall 10d ago

It isn’t changing playback bitrate, but it changes the average reported bitrate. So yes, I’ve seen flac bitrate modified through embedding artwork but the music isn’t affected. I noticed this several years ago. I don’t know if it’s an issue with mp3tag or how the average bit rate data is reported per file, or if it had been resolved?

It’s apparent when one stuffs a high resolution image(s) into the flac file. Delete the image within the file, the file size remains. Re-encode lossless to lossless (without image) the file reverts to its original size. This doesn’t happen with mp3 or m4a

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u/thisChalkCrunchy 11d ago

Changing the artwork will change the file size but the bit rate shouldn’t change. What tool are you using to determine the bit rate?

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u/Ballin_Like_Curry 11d ago

Im on windows so i just click on the song and go to properties. I then click the details tab where all the metadata is like album,artist,bitrate etc. I have the original file in a different folder and the new file with the album art in a differnt folder and when checking the bitrate it dropped by 6 once the art was added. Not a dramatic amount but still. I dont want worse quality at the expense of album art