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album art posts

Filed under: Odds and ends, iTunes

High quality album art (from Apple)


With Apple emphasizing Cover Flow more and more in the new iPods, etc., the need for good quality album art is ever increasing. I know iTunes is supposed to grab art for songs that are in your library and the iTunes Store, but in my experience it hasn't worked that well.

Fortunately, Josh Powell has cooked up a nice little site called Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber that lets you search the iTunes album art repository and download high quality jpgs from Apple's servers. In my brief test (with Springsteen albums), most of the cover art came back as 600 x 600px. However, some albums featured art up to 1425 x 1425 or higher.

The search engine is rather strict ("White Stripes" returned nothing, it had to be "The White Stripes"), but this looks like an excellent resource for filling in holes in your collection.

[via Digg]

Filed under: Cool tools, Freeware, iTunes

DockArt: Change your iTunes icon to Album Art

DockArt is a nice little iTunes plugin that does something simple, and does it well. When installed it will change the iTunes icon in your dock to the album art of the currently playing track (assuming of course that it has album art). The developer is on the ball and recently released an updated version for iTunes 7.

DockArt is a neat little toy that'll offers a very unobtrusive visual reminder of what's playing. Best of all it's a free download from developer Greg Weston, who requests donations for Fidelco.

Filed under: iTS, Software, Internet Tools, Apple

Get cover art from the iTunes Store without using iTunes

Who says you need to use iTunes 7 to get that sweet, sweet high res album art for the iTunes Store? Jesper Nøhr spent a little time looking at tcpdumps and headers and came up with a Perl script that will download album art for a given artist and album (there is even an online demo). It has been adapted to Python and PHP already. What language is next? I think an Applescript version would be very cool, though I don't know if AppleScript has the necessary functionality.

Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, iPod Family

The I-Deck brings some old school to the iPod


Feeling like something's missing from the digital age of music, with our lists of albums and artists in iTunes and tiny deck-of-cards sized iPods that fit our entire music collections in our pockets? The I-Deck might just be the fusion of old and new school for you. The album art you see is actually a touch screen that allows you to browse your library, right down to flicking the screen to skip a song, and spinning it to fast-forward - all while giving your music's album art the face time (and space) it deserves.

We received tips of this at the cool hunter, but there aren't any details on this being an actual product for sale; they simply end their post with "contact us if you require designer's contact details", so we have no idea if the I-Deck will appear in Apple Stores and Targets near you.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in

Filed under: iTS, iTunes, Widget Watch

Widget Watch: Album Art Widget

When I first saw Liquidx's Album Art Widget, I thought, "I don't want to have to jump to the Dashboard just to view album art." However, this widget does much more than that.

It does display the album art of the currently playing track, and will retrieve artwork for songs that don't have any (adding this found artwork to iTunes is easy). You can also change the ratings of songs, flip the widget over to view a list of other songs on the currently selected album and use it to control iTunes. Lastly, it will let you jump to the current song's home in iTunes or Amazon.

Filed under: Software, iTunes, Universal Binary

New Menuet skins available

Menuet, the menu bar add-on that lets you control iTunes, view album art and more, has been updated to version 1.0.1. The update includes several new "iPod" skins in six colors. I registered a copy soon after Scott found it at Macworld in January and now I use it every day. Other changes in 1.0.1 are:

  • Improved Growl song information bezel
  • Fixes for the high-resolution album art grabber
  • Fixes to and improvements for the registration and demo process
  • Various squashed bugs
Plus, this version is a universal binary. Menuet requires Mac OS 10.4 and a single license will cost you a worthwhile $12.95.

Tip of the Day

Use Spotlight as a reference tool. Type any word in the Spotlight box and one of the top entries will be a definition. Click on it, and it will bring up the dictionary application to check the word in either the dictionary, thesaurus, Apple database, or Wikipedia.


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