convert: Embed cover art from original files

[froogl]

Use case

I'm trying to use beets to sync/transcode my music library to my phone. I have a large music library with many FLAC files, which I'd like to transcode. The source files' tags are all clean, album covers are embedded into the source files.

Solution

I'd like to use the convert plugin to transcode my music library to my phone. This is the config I am using:

convert:
    never_convert_lossy_files: yes
    dest: /mnt/mtp/SD/Music
    embed: yes

The issue is that embed=yes does not re-embed the cover art from the source files. So the transcoded files end up without embedded cover art, which is not very intuitive. It would be more logical if beets (the convert plugin) would embed the same cover art from the source file to the transcoded file, if no other cover art is present.

This has also been discussed here: https://discourse.beets.io/t/convert-plugin-artwork-not-embedded/1064

Alternatives

For people who only keep their cover art in the tags there is no actual workaround. Especially not if beets is only used for transcoding.

[sampsyo]

Sounds good! Marking this as a feature request. For what it's worth, a possible workaround might be to use extractart first to associate an image with an album, and then to use convert to embed that.