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ITunes 11 and Colors

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Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#31

Post by adsr »

mwexler wrote: post #28
arrrg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That had nothing at all to do with the submission. Why the hell did you feel inspired to write this? I don’t get it. It seems like a fairly detailed description of your fairly niche needs that are hard to generalize in any real way. Neither useful nor really interesting.

Other than admitting to piracy, his needs sound like the same as anyone with a music collection of any realistic size. I struggle with many of the same issues around the emphasis on the "album cover" as the unit of organization in 11, so I don't think it's as niche as you make it sound. Agreed that it's a step away from the top level submission however.

It's a personal preference, and it's still possible to pick a list view with no album art in iTunes 11. I often have a visual recollection of album covers, be it singles or whole albums as well as physical location (if it's real singles).

It's not really only albums that gains from album art, singles with remixes would still have a cover which I vastly prefer myself as compared to a blank square.

Still it's a critique of iTunes as such, while the submission is related to generating color themes from an image algorithmically.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#32

Post by gruseom »

What's a good music player for OS X? I just want something simple that plays mp3s etc. and helps me manage my collection. Even before this redesign, iTunes was too bossy for me to like it. Is there something like Winamp when it was good?

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#33

Post by ghshephard »

joeguilmette wrote: post #20

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't wa…

I don't what's worse about your comment - that you seem to think that there is nothing wrong with having pirated music, that you admit to having done so in a public forum, or that you are so blasé about it that you did so with your (presumably) real name.

I wonder where people like you draw the line at such behavior. Why is music any different than TV Shows? Or Movies? Or eBooks? Would you feel comfortable "pirating" all those as well? Hell, why not go all the way and pirate software as well - presumably that has no protection from your urges to accumulate.

I often wonder, under what moral authority, other than "It was really easy and I wasn't caught and/or punished for doing it" people feel comfortable "pirating" other people's intellectual property.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#34

Post by forrestthewoods »

joeguilmette wrote: post #20

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't wa…

I hope you don't really think that $10 is "bit high, but fair". Spotify is horrible for artists and pays them next to nothing. Assuming you fully own the rights to your music it takes 232,000 plays per month just to make minimum wage for a single artist [1]. Now consider that Spotify, and similar streaming services, are losing money hand over fist and it's obvious this model can not last [2].

Personally I put Spotify at the same tier as piracy. I mean that not in terms of morals or ethics but in regards to the viability of the industry. If you want to copy all music ever recorded that's fine, go for it. We're almost all guilty to some extent. If however you'd like to see new music created in the future then you owe it to yourself to compensate the artists you enjoy.

The most dangerous thing about Spotify is that people genuinely believe listening to a few ads an hour or paying a mere $10/month is enough to support the industry they love.

[1] http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120730infamou... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-revenue-2012-10

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#35

Post by ojbyrne »

joeguilmette wrote: post #20

Until just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't wa…

Spotify is great, but my main concern with it is it is not profitable yet - far from it actually. So they could either go away at some point, or do draconian things that will make the experience too unpleasant to continue. So I'm not quite willing to rely on it yet.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#36

Post by ericdykstra »

gruseom wrote: post #32

What's a good music player for OS X? I just want something simple that plays mp3s etc. and helps me manage my collection. Even before this redesign, iTunes was too bossy for me to like it. Is there something like Winamp when it was good?

Check out Songbird at http://getsongbird.com/

I prefer foobar2000 on Windows for a pure, unadulterated, customizable music player, but Songbird is the best player I've found on OS X. It is fast, plays music, and has a plugin for last.fm, which is everything I require.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#38

Post by wiredfool »

nextstep wrote: post #24
ry0ohki wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that $10 for monthly access to basically every album ever on demand is "a bit high". I remember dropping $16 a pop on CDs/Tapes at Tower Records back in the day, probably bought at least two a month... In terms of your issue with iTunes cover art, didn't they announce some thing where you pay a flat fee and is basically matches all of your illegal music with legal one when iCloud was introduced (I never tried…

You're recalling iTunes Match, the service which allows you to upload/match your iTunes library and access it across multiple devices. This service is $25/year. However, you can have iTunes download album art (even for albums you've imported and haven't bought through iTunes) for free. You can just select every song in your library and the right-click and choose "Get Album Artwork" or something like that. It works de…

In my collection, The album art matcher is quite bad. Stuff that's tagged correctly and well known (e.g. Led Zeppelin) comes up with the wrong (but related) image. Where it really falls down are compilations, I think it's running about a 20% hit rate on those.

Re: ITunes 11 and Colors

#39

Post by arrrg »

mwexler wrote: post #28
arrrg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That had nothing at all to do with the submission. Why the hell did you feel inspired to write this? I don’t get it. It seems like a fairly detailed description of your fairly niche needs that are hard to generalize in any real way. Neither useful nor really interesting.

Other than admitting to piracy, his needs sound like the same as anyone with a music collection of any realistic size. I struggle with many of the same issues around the emphasis on the "album cover" as the unit of organization in 11, so I don't think it's as niche as you make it sound. Agreed that it's a step away from the top level submission however.

Most people buy/pirate music that has album covers or can easily be organized around album covers. iTunes is pretty good about giving even a library with pretty horrible metadata decent covers.

Plus: There is the artist view. I don’t see the emphasis on album covers. The artist view is just as (if not more) competent and it’s not at all based around the album cover.

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