iPods To Get Cover Flow, Firmware Update Coming Soon

[Jeremy Charette]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/26/ipods-to-get-cover-flow-firmware-update-coming-soon/' target='_blank'>http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/26/ipods-to-get-cover-flow-firmware-update-coming-soon/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The crew over at Giz has word that a new firmware update is coming for iPods, giving you the Cover Flow function that’s in iTunes. They’ve also been tipped off that iPods will not get a refresh until after the iPhone has launched."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/coverflow_3d.jpg" /> <br /><br />This is one of those "Why? Because I can!" features. Honestly, I'd rather scroll through an alphabetical list of my albums than use Cover Flow on my iPod. It's nice to see album art, but why? Who cares? I know Jason doesn't like the iPod's "old skool" interface, but what else do you need besides text? Ever since Apple added the ability to search by letter (A-Z), I really can't complain about the iPod interface. I'd go so far as to say it's just about perfect.

[Tim Williamson]

Cover Flow for Nanos too?

[Jason Dunn]

You're obviously not a visual person Jeremy. ;-) I nearly wet my pants when I saw this, because it's so beautiful, fast, smooth, and just all around gorgeous. Apple did something REALLY nice here and I commend them for it! I was already unhappy with the crappy quality of the album art on my Zune, and now Apple does this just to kick sand in the Zune's face. Damn. :?

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

I'm with Jeremy on this one. In fact the reason I got the Zen Vision:M was because of the ability to thumb through albums and songs alphabetically, when the iPod didn't.

[Jeremy Charette]

Part of my problem is that iTunes does a TERRIBLE job of finding album art. Probably half of my albums in iTunes don't have cover art.

I was pleasantly surprised by WMP 10 however, it did a fantastic job filling in missing album art. Unfortunately none of it is usable by iTunes.

But again, why do I care? Honestly, I don't! I search by alphabetical listing anyway! It's all just completely unnecessary eye candy.

Now, Media Center, that's a different story. When friends are over, it's a neat trick to pull up Media Center, and flip through album covers on the HDTV.

[Dyvim]

I was pleasantly surprised by WMP 10 however, it did a fantastic job filling in missing album art. Unfortunately none of it is usable by iTunes.

What size images does WMP 10 fetch? I initially ripped my CD collection using WMP 9 and it did a great job of finding album artwork, but the best it got was 200x200 (and why did it save 4 jpegs per album? 2 identical copies each of 75x75 and 200x200). When I switched to iTunes after receiving my first iPod as a gift, I realized how lame the WMP-loaded artwork was and had to go out searching for my own (even Amazon generally has at least 300x300 artwork if not 500x500).

BTW, there are programs you can use to automatically embed your external WMP artwork into your .mp3 files. It just searches your music collection for folder.jpg and if found embeds it into any music files in that folder. And it's smart enough to skip files that already have embedded images. Think it was called iCoverArt. I had over 5000 songs in 400-some albums to convert - no way was I going to do that by hand.

[Jason Dunn]

What size images does WMP 10 fetch?

Crappy 200 x 200 over-compressed JPEGs. They suck.

[timmy]

BTW, there are programs you can use to automatically embed your external WMP artwork into your .mp3 files.

You can do it manually also by using e.g. Mediatagger (freeware)

http://www.viktorin.cz/media_tagger/eng/index.html

I thought you could embed cover art into MP3/WMA files by selecting "Keep my settings as global settings in files" (sorry, I don't have the english version of WMP11 so it probably isn't exactly phrased like this) but found out that: The cover art downloaded by WMP11 seems NOT to be embedded even with the setting above active, but if you download cover art separately and drag&amp;drop the gif/jpg onto the empty "CD" icon in the WMP11 library view you get a "working..." dialog and WMP11 actually embeds the pictures into the files. Then you can play them in any player capable of showing cover art.

However in your library you can't see the difference between album art that is downloaded by WMP and not embedded, and albums with embedded art so that you have to remember by yourself (I haven't found a way at least)...

[Phoenix]

You're obviously not a visual person Jeremy. ;-) I nearly wet my pants when I saw this, because it's so beautiful, fast, smooth, and just all around gorgeous. Apple did something REALLY nice here and I commend them for it! I was already unhappy with the crappy quality of the album art on my Zune, and now Apple does this just to kick sand in the Zune's face. Damn. :?

I'm with you on this. I really like my iPod, but I've been tired of the plain white background, text alone is just so boring to me, and this isn't the first time I've made mention of that.

So I'm really looking forward to cover flow on the iPod. I often appreciate a little eye candy and this will be a really slick and beautiful way to navigate through the music.

Most of my cover art iTunes found, but some of it, it didn't find, which was strange considering that iTunes online had those albums and the cover art to go with it.

But I quickly rectified this by going here: Find My Cover. (www.findmycover.com) This was one of the easiest ways I've found to locate and copy missing cover art so I could paste it into iTunes.