iPod Cover Flow - What's the Attraction?

The way I see it, it's eyecandy, nothing more. However, eyecandy can sell.

Because it looks cool. You don't have to use it, you know.

Because album art used to be a nice, involving way to know your music, and it's fallen by the wayside. Any attempt to bring it back into the public eye is a good one, IMO.

astrostu said:

And the idea that they're adding this as a view in 10.5? Why would anyone choose the cover flow view to search their Utilities folder?

Click to expand...

It allows realtime sampling and previewing of documents, videos, pics, etc. in a nice, big interface. If you don't like it, turn it off.

Chaszmyr said:

The way I see it, it's eyecandy, nothing more. However, eyecandy can sell.

Click to expand...

I agree. Although I suppose if you're looking for an album, you might recognize it by the album art quicker than the name.

But when iTunes doesn't provide album art for 50% of my music, of course I'm not going to use CoverFlow...

Hooray for eyecandy though! As long as it's done tastefully.

Osarkon said:

I agree. Although I suppose if you're looking for an album, you might recognize it by the album art quicker than the name.

But when iTunes doesn't provide album art for 50% of my music, of course I'm not going to use CoverFlow...

Hooray for eyecandy though! As long as it's done tastefully.

Click to expand...

You can probably fill in the gaps in your collection in a couple hours spent with something like rateyourmusic.com. I did. =)

For many of us, it just looks purdy.

I'm with you. I never use it. I know what I want, and browse by genre/artist/album. It's a lot quicker. But in the olden days, we used to know albums by cover.

Where I really don't get coverflow is with documents (in Leopard). I've always been really good about file naming and directory usage, so this is one feature that will be completely lost on me.

Heavy Doody said:

Where I really don't get coverflow is with documents (in Leopard). I've always been really good about file naming and directory usage, so this is one feature that will be completely lost on me.

Click to expand...

Believe me, not everyone is good about file naming.

Me, for example.

Cover Flow - What's the Attraction?

Click to expand...

It looks pretty. Really thats all.

Well on the iphone/ipod touch, when you don't really know what music you're in the mood for, you can just flick to coverflow and browse through your albums and rediscover some music you haven't heard in a while. It's just a different, more soothing I think, experience to browsing your music. Plus, it's always nice to view album artwork, I've always found it a fun time waster going into a record store and flicking through the cds.

It looks good, some people will use it, some wont.

only mp3s from itunes have cover flow right?

will the mp3s i rip from the albums i got from store have cover flow?

For me? None.

Most of my music is ripped from my CDs and doesn't have album art. My computer is too slow to support coverflow in iTunes so I haven't made any effort to find any album art. And when I listen to my iPod I use shuffled playlists 99% of the time. So not much attraction for me, aside from it looking cool.

For Apple? It looks cool and may help sell more songs/albums via iTunes where you (usually) get the album art automatically.

Greg

stuff99 said:

only mp3s from itunes have cover flow right?

will the mp3s i rip from the albums i got from store have cover flow?

Click to expand...

Nope and in many cases yep. iTunes has a find artwork feature and you can add whatever graphics you want by hand.

gloss said:

Because album art used to be a nice, involving way to know your music, and it's fallen by the wayside. Any attempt to bring it back into the public eye is a good one, IMO.

Click to expand...

Led Zeppelin LPs are the best. Any album where you can change out the cover art like Physical Graffiti, really.

A lot of people can remember the image of something better than the album title or the song titles, so it would easier to find what they want.

I don't see it as important on Mac OS X but for a kiosk, it would be easy and impressive.

the cover almost gives you a feel for the album and what "mood" the artist was going for

greg555 said:

For me? None.

Most of my music is ripped from my CDs and doesn't have album art. My computer is too slow to support coverflow in iTunes so I haven't made any effort to find any album art. And when I listen to my iPod I use shuffled playlists 99% of the time. So not much attraction for me, aside from it looking cool.

For Apple? It looks cool and may help sell more songs/albums via iTunes where you (usually) get the album art automatically.

Greg

Click to expand...

most of my music is ripped from cds but i got a lot of the art from itunes and i love the way it all looks.

I think it's very cool having Cover Flow on your iPod. I have always appreciated album covers and as a visual artist I will be using Cover Flow on my iPod. Besides it's purtty

I like flicking through my albums that way. You get the "Ooh, I haven't listened to that in ages" feeling that you don't get with text.

Cover flow is cool, but you'll get tired of it after 5 minutes. It's soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo over rated.

One of the downsides to buying music via a download-based service is that you don't get to enjoy the album art. Album art makes an album instantly recognizable. With cover flow, it lets you browse your music as if you were thumbing through a stack of CD's.

Along the lines of this thread, i shall give myself a pat on the back for finally getting all my album art for all my songs. I started out with about 1,000 songs (most of 'em I didn't really like, and it's gotten down to 300, then I started buying itunes music and now it's up to about 450). I wanted all my songs to be in MP3 vs. MP4 and I wanted them all to be the same bitrate (80kbps, I know, it's kinda low, but to my ears, it makes no diff, I noticed a diff to 64kbps, so I chose 80, saves a lot of space). And now my purchased songs are uncopywrighted (not that I need that feature for anything, jus a good feeling). I then proceeded to copy the album art directly to the MP3. (I also fixed all the tags, so my genres are more organized to wut I think they should be vrs. itunes).

I am so happy I finally completed such a task! Just in time for the new ipod touch too! And I have 2gigs on my macbook and coverflow is awesome, even in full screen, with the remote across the room!