MP3 album art and cloud-based transcoding services

[vrtjason]

I am interested in using a cloud-based transcoding service to add album art to the transcoded MP3 files that they will be generating. As of last Friday, October 25, 2013, Amazon Elastic Transcoder just started offering audio transcoding and they do include album art. But according to their press release, they force the transcoded audio to be 2-channel, even if the source was 1-channel, which unnecessarily puffs up the file size and wastes bandwidth when transferred to end users over a network. So because of that, I feel that right now, Amazon Elastic Transcoder for audio is still a little half baked.

I thought I might try Zencoder, Encoding.com, and the transcoding service provided by JW Player. All of them tell me that they DO NOT offer album art for audio files. What??????? No joke; it's true.

Does anyone here know of any cloud-based transcoding services that do offer album art for audio files (besides Amazon)? Thank you.

[Ghitulescu]

Why would be the need for transcoding? It seems to be the craze of the internet since its invention ... is the cloud space so tight that one badly needs to save 200MB each album? :) Nevertheless, like all illogic things it's hard to get rid of it.
My advice, get rid of the cloud services, it will come a day when you'll have to get something off the cloud and you can't, it happened in the past, three times to my knowledge.

[vrtjason]

@Ghitulescu:

One reason for transcoding is to distribute embedded recordings via HTML5. The current best practice is to make a version in a patent-laden format for IE, Safari and Chrome (such as MP4 containing h.264 video and aac audio), as well as another version in a (supposedly) non-patent-encumbered format (such as WebM containing vp8 video and vorbis audio) for other browsers like Firefox and Opera. Firefox, which won't read the patent-laden formats, just recently started using the OS to decode the patent-laden formats. But still there are other Web clients that haven't done the same. So for HTML5 it is necessary to transcode into at least 2 different formats (MP4 and WebM, for example).

But if the issue you're asking is why should one use a cloud service to do the transcoding, my answer would be to set up an automated process that scales, such as when source recordings are supplied by a large community of users. If one cloud provider does go down (or seems unreliable), market demand will ensure that another provider will fill in the gap.