Nontrivial Exercises

iTunes 7 Goodness, Cover Flow and CoverFlow

The much anticipated SteveNote occurred today and now all the fantasy-Apple players get to reconcile their predictions with what actually occurred. I, for one, thought we’d see more about high definition and a bigger screen iPod, but the movies and new iPod Nano seemed to be a consensus pick that came true.

Though I don’t have an iPod, I love iTunes and have it full of podcasts and music. I wanted to see how iTunes 7 looked first hand, so I installed it tonight. I was also intrigued by the announcement of the new album art viewing feature, called Cover Flow.

Hmmm, haven’t I heard something like that before? Ah yes, it’s from an app called CoverFlow. Strangely, CoverFlow offers a 3D view of the album art of your iTunes music library, and where you don’t have the album art already, CoverFlow tries to download it from Amazon or other online sources.

But in this case, it turns out that Apple has actually purchased the technology from Jonathan del Strother outright and officially. Hooray for Apple. Sure they copy some third party apps and incorporate their functionality into their software - usually the OS - but they also at times purchase or officially license the technology from developers. This is a great story of the latter.

Despite the end of the standalone CoverFlow app, I wanted to see how the two incarnations compared. Good thing I already had CoverFlow!

Here are my first impressions of iTunes overall.

First of all, I used Software Update to get iTunes 7. Quicktime and an update to Front Row also came along.

After some downloading, installing and a restart, I was treated to the new iTunes. The first thing that happened was iTunes going through my library and “Determining Gapless Playback Information” for each track. I’m not exactly sure what this means, but it seemed to go through each entry in my library.

This didn’t take too long, and after it was done, the next thing I noticed was the new, cleaner left-hand interface:

I really like the six categories it creates for your library. And of course the newest entry is Movies. I’m not getting any movies, at least not just yet, so I’m sticking with the album art experimentation.

You have to prompt iTunes to go find your album art, and you first must be logged into the ITMS with your Apple ID.

Next, iTunes churns away, combing through the musty archives of the ITMS, presumably, to find the pretty pictures that go with your great music.

OK, now I want to see the Cover Flow in action. iTunes 7 has a three-option view selector added to the top of the interface, and the Cover Flow is the third option:

Well, there it was. A nice scrolling CD-like view of all the albums I had in my library.The idea is fantastic, and it really does work well in iTunes 7. However, one thing I notice is that, at least for my music collection, there are several albums for which it did not find album art. Interestingly, the CoverFlow app did find artwork for some, but then again, iTunes found a couple that CoverFlow didn’t. Here are a couple of examples:

iTunes - not there:

CoverFlow app - it’s there:

and as you would expect, especially if you’re a lawyer:

iTunes - not there:

CoverFlow app - it’s there:

But conversely,

iTunes - it’s there:

CoverFlow app - not there:

So my music collection is definitely not Top 40 and perhaps my examples are just the long tail of the album art collection group on the ITMS. But, there are still a lot of blank albums when I scroll through, and hopefully Apple will be adding to their downloadable album art collection.

Regarding the iTunes Cover Flow interface vs. the CoverFlow app, Apple did a great job incorporating Jonathan’s work into iTunes. Overall I prefer the CoverFlow standalone app because the scrolling is a bit cooler, and the scroll bar with the letter of the current artist is a bit more useful than just a scroll bar that iTunes offers.

However, having a Cover Flow view built right into iTunes is very convenient and just a fantastic way to scroll through your music.