There are and will be several articles about today’s expected iTunes upgrade, but I just want to take a little time to write about one my favorite features in this newest version.
When I saw that Apple had incorporated Cover Flow into iTunes 7 I immediately had to download it. I’ve had initial versions of CoverFlow installed on my computer for several months now (I wrote about it back in March) and I’ve often opened it and searched through downloaded album art attached to each of my songs in iTunes.
From the start, CoverFlow has been a sweet, stylish and slick little application that brought the beauty of album covers to the digital music world. When you run it, it’s like flipping through a crate of albums to find what you want to play.
Well now that CoverFlow is a part of iTunes, this little piece of eye candy will be the usual way I navigate though my iTunes playlists. You simply select a playlist and click on the cover browser button on the top left side of iTunes. You also have the option to view album covers and lists at the same. Of course you can also click on one of the covers and it will cause that song or album to start playing. Unfortunately, however, it seems as though when you change playlist, these visual views revert back to the traditional word list view. I can’t find in iTunes preferences any way to change it so that one of the cover views is the default navigation view.
Speaking of album art, Apple has also added a way to automatically fetch available album art for any CD you import into iTunes. This feature will also replace several AppleScript plug-ins that do the same thing.
When I saw this feature, I picked out a song that didn’t have album art just see how it worked. (Click on Advance in iTunes menu bar and select Get Album Art.) I was surprised to discover that this features goes though your entire library looking for songs that don’t have album art associated with it. It’s scanning about 644 of my over three thousand songs. (By the way, and just for the record, all those songs are legal downloads and imports!) I guess Apple anticipated a problem with this, so you’re greeted with this message when you apply the feature.
As I’m finishing this article, it seems as if the fetch art feature has downloaded album art for nearly all my songs that didn’t have covers already. The fetch art feature doesn’t give a report for how many songs were updated with album art, but I’m sure someone will come up with an AppleScript that does.Â
If you have an huge iTunes collection and/or a slow computer, you may experience some problems in navigating through albums using cover view. It may takes a little extra time for iTunes to locate the cover art, so I wouldn’t always advise using this feature to search through your entire music library; that is, unless you have a fairly fast computer.
Finally, on another visual tip, Apple has improved the button icons for each of the iTunes features. This seriously makes sense, and it points to how important it is that software developers understand more and more how effective visual icons and design can help users navigate and use software better.
There are also, of course, other new features for iTunes that I’m sure will be covered by other writers on the MyMac team and other Apple related websites.
I would love to hear what our readers think about the CoverFlow feature and how it’s working for you.
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