CLI cover description and type

[git-anish]

hey,

how do I go about setting the "type" and description value of an image using the CLI utility?

typically its passed in the same line such as cover=/path/to/file.jpg:FRONT_COVER:album art

in this case the cover would be file.jpg, its type would be FRONT_COVER and its description would be "album art"

[Martchus]

Looks like I really have never needed and therefore never implemented this. Making this work via the syntax you're proposing would be easy to implement.

[git-anish]

great, thats the syntax from eyeD3

its a useful feature incase you want to avoid overwriting existing images in mp3s since setting a different type and description from existing images avoids overwriting them in eyeD3

I saw the GUI has the feature so I thought it might have already been implemented in CLI

thanks for getting back to me!

[Martchus]

in mp3s/m4as

I assume you mean MP3 files and MP4 files. Note that MP4 tags (iTunes tag format) do not allow to set multiple covers of different types and there's also no support for a description - at least not to my knowledge. This feature is in fact only supported by ID3v2 tags and Vorbis Comments. (And cover images in Matroska files are a whole different story anyways.)

I saw the GUI has the feature so I thought it might have already been implemented in CLI

The GUI and CLI are not fully equivalent. I simply implemented certain features where I needed them or considered them most useful.

[Martchus]

I've been implementing the feature and updating the README. Note that extraction by cover type is still missing.

[git-anish]

Hey! testing this out now, how do I ensure existing covers are not overwritten when adding new covers?

I saw a few examples that you'd set to remove them but not to keep them

[Martchus]

Existing covers should actually be kept by default (unless --remove-other-fields is specified). This is what I mean with "Other cover types are not affected." in the README. Of course only one cover per type is possible and as already mentioned this is not supported by MP4 tags (where therefore the type is ignored and the previous cover can not be preserved).

If it isn't yet working as intended it would be helpful to know the command you've been using so I can reproduce with less effort.

[git-anish]

I'm trying this on MP3s only tageditor set title="A" album="B" albumartist="C" disk=1 genre="D" year="2021-05-06" comment="E" cover0=~/1.jpg:front-cover:2 -f ~/1.mp3

tageditor set title="A" album="B" albumartist="C" disk=1 genre="D" year="2021-05-06" comment="E" cover=~/1.jpg:front-cover:1 -f ~/1.mp3

either of these commands will overwrite the existing covers even if their descriptions are different

I guess I'm used to eyeD3, it allows for multiple images in the same type and doesn't overwrite covers if descriptions are different under the same type.

I can confirm that setting a different type (back) does ensure existing (front) covers won't be overwritten. This is enough for my purposes, thanks again!

[Martchus]

The standard actually says that there might be different covers with only different descriptions:

Description is a short description of the picture, represented as a terminated text string. There may be several pictures attached to one file, each in their individual "APIC" frame, but only one with the same content descriptor. There may only be one picture with the picture type declared as picture type $01 and $02 respectively.

I assume "content descriptor" means combination of the type and description.

So the way eyeD3 handles it is correct and I should likely adapt the tag editor.

[Martchus]

This should actually work now with https://github.com/Martchus/tageditor/commit/1944773022fb921beba7b696667d11366cb15e05.