Trick Around Downscaled Album Art In Poweramp With Increased Resolution On

[StrengthByBeats]

Hello, just a quick tip if the downscaled resolution album artwork is driving you nuts with Increased Resolution on just follow these steps to prevent it. First, long press the album art of the album and set it to no album art. Then lastly copy the artwork in your music folder or elsewhere at very hi-resolution of let's say 3000x3000 to /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.maxmpz.audioplayer/files/selected_aa. However, if you prefer .webp for album art instead of .jpg as I do as it's newer tech and is way better lossy compression change the .webp extension to .jpg and it will show the album art not downscaled still. When you set the album art to none it will leave a blank .jpg in the folder I mentioned above and it's imperative you name the copied artwork the same as the blank one with .jpg. Obviously delete the blank .jpg first. This works beautifully around hi-resolution artwork being downscaled. Give it a shot as I crush it and do the same thing for selected artist images. Downscaling does a number on image quality. 😁😁😁

[andrewilley]

You can just create brand new image files inside selected_aa , naming them using Poweramp's defined naming conventions, if you wish. No need to go through the process of forcing a blank .jpg file first - although that does help to confirm the exact name that PA needs of course. As you say, PA uses .JPG extenders for the names in those cache folders, even if the actual underlying file format is PNG or other Android-compatible image formats.

Most supplied audio files tend to have something around 600x600 images embedded but I usually source mine a bit higher at 1000x1000, and I keep the embedded JPG file sizes down to around 150Kb to avoid wasting space unnecessarily. Anything much beyond that is pretty-much overkill for a small phone screen, but it could still be theoretically useful if you are using a large 4K TV screen or computer monitor. But even 4K screens can't display 3000x3000 pixel images natively, you'd need 8K for that.

At the end of the day, I tend to treat cover art as a quick visual reminder of what song I've selected, and don't otherwise pay it very much attention. Most of my actual listening is done with my ears anyway, and the phone screen is off (kills the battery otherwise).

Andre

[maxmp]

@StrengthByBeats Poweramp specifically scales images so they are within your screen physical pixels density. There is no point of loading and showing 3000px image on 1024px width screen (minus paddings) - it will be scaled down anyway. 3000x3000 image will take 36mb (recent Androids with optimized hardware bitmaps) to 72mb (older Androids, these tend to keep same image 2 times in the memory). While app is allowed to take like 128-256mb max, so Poweramp will trash image cache more frequently for the larger images.

[StrengthByBeats]

@maxmp Thanks for the reply and information and I argue with you none after that. However, I don't know what happens specifically but when I do this it definitely comes out with a higher a quality image even if downscaled still opposed to choosing a 3000x3000 artwork and letting Poweramp downscale it to a 1024x1024 .jpg in that folder. Thanks and here are two screenshots one with my trick and the other with Poweramp just downscaling when selecting the artwork. You can compare the two with VES-Image comparer and see a huge quality difference zoomed in. 

[maxmp]

@StrengthByBeats you probably see results of bitmap filtering vs non-filtering. Filtering (when downscaling) will produce smoother, slightly softer image. Non-filtered scaling will keep more details, but the contrasting edges may be visually rough (aliased). 

It's possible to add option to enable/disable filtering, at least for the downscaling.

[StrengthByBeats]

@maxmp Ok, thanks for the further info. Good information for me to look into:) 

[andrewilley]

The second image (the one with the 5:14 clock) does indeed seem sharper, but probably nothing I would ever have been concerned about without being able to do an A-B comparison on a large high-res screen.

Andre

[StrengthByBeats]

Yeah, I would like to add I actually started doing this for selected artist images that were huge resolution. However, if you embed the album art this is not needed as the album art displays at the same quality. I say this after comparing the album art that's embedded to the album art with this trick. Something I overlooked:)