EmbedArt Doesn't Seem to Embed Artwork into FLAC Files

[mkoby]

I've been using beets to whip my music collection into shape. I already had it pretty nicely managed but it's been a while since I've looked into this process and a lot has changed over the years. I've got things mostly where I want them, except that when I mess around with album art it doesn't seem to be behaving. I'll post my config below but for now I want to discuss the issue I'm seeing.

I've done a beet fetchart -f to grab artwork for everything now that I have the files and folder structure where I like them, and it put a cover.jpg into the album folder. I then did a beet embedart album:"Some Album" and saw that it supposedly embedded the artwork (I can see data in the artpath and art_source fields, and art_path is pointing at the folder's cover.jpg). Thinking that I needed to "apply" the changes to the file to have the embed actually take place, I even did a beet update on a test album and things look like it behaved.

However, when I open the FLAC files for an album in kid3.app on my Mac (a tool I've long used for mild edits and just checking things), I don't see the art in the files. If open a test track in VLC or Picard, it kind of looks like the image is in the file but I'm not 100% sure if either of those apps are reading it from the file itself or if they're just using the cover.jpg from the folder.

Is there some trick to definitely get the artwork into the files that I'm missing? There doesn't seem to be any thing special in the EmbedArt plugin document that I'm missing. I do have embedart set to auto: no because I want to do that work myself (I've already seen beets grab bad artwork in some random instances).

Can someone provide some real guidance here? I'm kind of lost and believe there's something I'm not fully understanding about how to handle artwork.

Config file...

directory: /Volumes/media/flac
library: /Volumes/media/flac/beets_musiclibrary.db

import:
  move: no
  copy: yes
  write: yes
  resume: ask
  quiet_fallback: skip
  timid: no # Set to 'no' so that 100% matches are accepted by default
  log: /Volumes/media/flac/beets.log
  incremental: yes
  art: yes # Enable album art fetching during import
  autotag: yes # Enable autotagging
  quiet: no # Keep interactive unless overridden by match
  detail: yes # Show detailed import information

match:
  strong_rec_thresh: 0.0001 # 100% match threshold
  medium_rec_thresh: 0.999 # Everything below 100% requires confirmation
  ignore_video_tracks: yes
  preferred:
    media: ["CD", "Digital Media"]
    formats: ["Album"]
    original_year: yes

# edit - Allows interactive editing of metadata before final import
# zero - Clears unwanted fields (e.g., comments, encoder settings)
# unimported - Find folders not yet imported by beets
# missing - Helps detect missing files/tracks from albums

plugins: bandcamp
  discogs
  duplicates
  edit
  embedart
  fetchart
  fromfilename
  ftintitle
  info
  lastgenre
  mbsync
  missing
  scrub
  spotify
  unimported
  zero

# Bandcamp metadata and artwork
bandcamp:
  source_weight: 0.8
  include_digital_only_tracks: true
  search_max: 2
  art: yes
  comments_separator: "\n---\n"
  truncate_comments: no
  exclude_extra_fields: [comments]
  genre:
    capitalize: no
    maximum: 0
    always_include: []
    mode: progressive # classical, progressive or psychedelic

# Discogs metadata and artwork
discogs:
  source_weight: 0.9
  #tokenfile: ~/.config/beets/discogs_token.json
  user_token: REDACTED
  artwork: yes # Enable cover art downloading from Discogs

embedart:
  auto: no # we’re running it manually
  extract: yes # enables extracting to cover files
  remove_art_file: no

# Album art fetching
fetchart:
  auto: yes
  #enforce_ratio: 0.5%
  fanarttv_key: REDACTED
  google_key: REDACTED
  minwidth: 500
  sources: filesystem bandcamp discogs coverart itunes amazon albumart wikipedia fanarttv
  store_source: yes # Adds original source URL to the logs for reference
  cautious: yes # Only replace art if none is embedded or fetched yet

# Ensures genre tags are normalized
lastgenre:
  source: album
  canonical: yes
  whitelist: ~/.config/beets/genre-whitelist.txt
  count: 1
  fallback: Unknown
  auto: yes

missing:
  count: yes
  total: yes
  album: yes

# Spotify (metadata only — no art)
spotify:
  source_weight: 0.7
  show_failures: yes

unimported:
  ignore_extensions: jpg png txt log m3u cue
  ignore_hidden: yes

zero:
  auto: yes
  fields: comments images encoder

## File/folder naming with ASCII-safe filenames
asciify_path: yes
per_disc_numbering: yes

paths:
  default: $albumartist/($year) $album%aunique{}/$disc-$track $title
  singleton: $albumartist/($year) $title (Single)/$title
  comp: 00-Compilations/$album%aunique{}/$disc-$track $title
  albumtype:single: $albumartist/($year) $album (Single)%aunique{}/$disc-$track $title
  albumtype:soundtrack: 00-Soundtracks/$album%aunique{}/$disc-$track $title

replace:
  '[\\/]': _
  '^\.': _
  '[<>:"\?\*\|]': _
  '\s+$': ""
  '^\s+': ""
  '[^\x00-\x7F]': ""
  "æ": "ae"
  "ø": "o"
  "å": "a"
  "é": "e"
  "è": "e"
  "ê": "e"
  "ë": "e"
  "á": "a"
  "à": "a"
  "ä": "a"
  "ö": "o"
  "ü": "u"
  "ß": "ss"
  "ñ": "n"
  "ç": "c"
  "œ": "oe"
  "Œ": "Oe"

ui:
  color: yes
  terminal_width: 120

[DjSlash]

Can't speak about embedart for myself, because I don't use it. But if I wanted to test a file, I'd rather use a commandline tool like metaflac than something graphical, since I can't determine what it does or does not.

I even did a beet update on a test album and things look like it behaved.

beet update is for updating beets database from files metadata. You want beet write to update files from database. So only use update when something ondisk changed outside beets knowledge.

[mkoby]

Okay, I'm not familiar with the metaflac command but assuming I understood the help information correctly enough here's the results of looking at file...

This command doesn't show anything related to pictures/images in the tags...
metaflac --show-all-tags flac/Celldweller/\(2003\)\ Celldweller/01-02\ Switchback.flac

And this command, which is supposed to show picture data also doesn't bring anything back...
metaflac --list --block-type=PICTURE --data-format=text flac/Celldweller/\(2003\)\ Celldweller/01-02\ Switchback.flac

I looked at the code for the embedart command and it looks like it should be embedding the art into the files, but it doesn't appear to be actually doing that. I'm willing to look at the tags with metaflac if I can be pointed to specific tags or specific commands to use to verify.

[mkoby]

I keeping up with this, doing a metaflac --import-picture-from="cover.jpg" 01-02\ Switchback.flac and then doing metaflac --list --block-type=PICTURE --data-format=text flac/Celldweller/\(2003\)\ Celldweller/01-02\ Switchback.flac shows that the file was embedded into the FLAC file. I'm going to submit an issue on this for the embedart plugin because I don't think it's actually embedding anything in the FLAC files when it gets run.

[mkoby]

Further digging... The issue is the zero plugin.

While filling out the Issues template to submit an issue I ran the beet -vv embedart on the album and got something like the following:

embedart: embedding /Volumes/media/flac/Celldweller/(2003) Celldweller/cover.jpg
Sending event: write
zero: comments:  -> None
zero: images: [<mediafile.Image object at 0x1072b7dc0>] -> None
zero: encoder: X Lossless Decoder 20161007 -> None
Sending event: after_write

Specifically the part zero: images: [<mediafile.Image object at 0x1072b7dc0>] -> None caught my eye. I changed the zero config piece to not include images and that seems to have fixed the problem. Apparently the zero plugin was canceling out my embedart plugin with some kind of callback that runs on the files.

Definitely user error on my part. I didn't think the zero plugin ran on every modification, I had it in place mostly for importing as I wanted certain things zeroed out so that I could rely on the beets import and plugins to fill in the data.

Good news is, this is now figured out. Bad news is, I need to rerun embedart on my entire collection.