Re-encode uploaded/submitted MP3's with LAME removing artwork but keeping ID3 tags

Question

We have users upload a zip file of mp3s to our server which we then put into a streaming player. We've found that embedded artwork in the file can cause the streaming process to stall by anything up to 30 seconds! So we wanted to remove the embedded artwork and re-encode at 128kbps for streaming purposes, but we also want to keep the standard ID3 tags as GETID3 reads them for track titles.

Can anyone think of a way to do this on the server? Failing the re-encoding would there be a simple way to just remove the artwork?

Answer 1

You can use most id3 editors to remove tags, so you could remove the value of the image tag. 2 such tools that you could use to do this are id3v2 or eyeD3.

Examples

$ id3v2 -r "APIC" *.mp3 
$ eyeD3 --remove-all-images *.mp3