Album art question

[sdrob04]

I'm scanning my own album artwork and was hoping for some input on scan resolution, overall image file size, etc.  I'll be running SK Jukebox on a Betson 27" hybrid (Arcade VGA card) and was wondering if there were any definite learnings that people could share in the realm of album art. 

I've been scanning at 75dpi with an 'Artprint(175lpi)' option on my Compaq S200 scanner.  Finished files look good and end up being around 120-250KB.

[Chris]

"ideal album art size" would seem to be dependent on your exact configuration.  If all you're going to use this art for is the jukebox, take a screenshot, measure the size of the resulting album cover and there's your ideal resolution.  As for file size, the smaller the better, since album art images are (probably) loaded on the fly. 

[Barry Barcrest]

Personally i don't recommend going over 30k for the cover images unless you want serious speed issues. I have found this to be the case with most of the software i have used. I resized all my images to 320x320 which look fine for me, you might want a higher resolution but like Chris says the larger the image the slower the app will be as it will load these on the fly.

[Bumblebounces]

I use SK Jukebox and keep my album art at right about 100K in size.  The size and resolution I shoot for is 500x500 at 200dpi.  True, this is overkill if you are simply displaying in your juke but I ocassionally need to print a cover and decided a long time ago (before I started with SKJ)  to "standardize" everything at the above target.  Regarding load times...  I run SKJ on a P3-550MHz machine with a cheesy 8MB video card.  The mobo has 4MB video which made the screen slides struggle.  8MB is still not the best but with some tweaking to speed settings, it's function is very reasonable considering the outdated (but cheap) nature of the hardware.

Someday, I want to upgrade to something a little faster in the juke so this will not be an issue at all.

My 2 cents...

Bumble

[Barry Barcrest]

100k might be ok for SK Juke as that only displays 4 images at once. I found 100k to produce a degree of slowdown on 6 covers compared to 30k but it is all down to the users perception of what is acceptable. I still keep my 1,000k images for printing and just create an image in the folder caled cover.jpg that i use for the juke. The printing images are called Front.jpg, Back.jpg etc..