Album Art

[franzshire]

It just works? Funny. I switched from PC to MAC and this has been very frustrating. I have hundreds of albums in my music collection, all very well tagged and formatted. I bought a brand new MBPr and it'd be great to be able to access my library and not have to read every album title under this gaudy ugly blue blank folder icon.

It just works? Does it? Really? I am very computer literate, and resourceful.. I can usually figure this stuff out after trolling Google for a bit. Not the case. There seems to be no straightforward solution to this inane problem. For an OS touted as so easy to use, why is this basic functionality so difficult? Am I really going to be forced to just look at 700 useless blank folder icons when finding my music?

Sorry if the tone is off putting, I've spent too much time on this problem to not have found a solution.

 

[iLog.Genius]

What exactly is the problem you're actually having? You're not really clear in your post.

 

[franzshire]

Sorry. The actual problem is that I have an external hard drive that has over 300 gigs of music in it. They are sorted into albums. Lots of FLAC so I am not using iTunes. I have a folder titled MUSIC LIBRARY that contains over 700 subfolders which all have folder.jpg images in them. Ideally, as in Windows, the subfolders would be represented visually by the self-contained folder.jpg and not by this:

When I open finder to browse my folders, it would be much easier to see all the covers instead of having to squint to see all the text under hundreds of identical blue folders. I am running Lion 10.7.4 if that helps.

 

[GGJstudios]

Sorry. The actual problem is that I have an external hard drive that has over 300 gigs of music in it. They are sorted into albums. Lots of FLAC so I am not using iTunes. I have a folder titled MUSIC LIBRARY that contains over 700 subfolders which all have folder.jpg images in them. Ideally, as in Windows, the subfolders would be represented visually by the self-contained folder.jpg

Album art appears in the music file icons, not folder icons. If you're squinting to read the text, either increase the font size, zoom in, or get some reading glasses. Most people don't spend a lot of time browsing their music collection in Finder. It's much more effective to browse in iTunes, where album art is much more visible.

 

[franzshire]

Fair enough. I guess I will just have to look to dig deeper into making iTunes work with FLAC and stream from my hard drive. Thanks anyway. Sorry for my petulance.

 

[firestarter]

Convert FLAC to ALAC. It's lossless, an open standard and the copy will be bit perfect.

Then use iTunes.

 

[franzshire]

How long would that take for 355 gigs? OSX is proving to be very annoying. Great machine, but at what cost? I tried the workaround Fluke, and of course one of the recent iTunes updates rendered it useless (that is unless I want to fumble around with command lines and other such technical jumble that is a pain). I don't get it... I feel like the OS is built in a way to hold its users back from doing what they want to do. I resent Apple for making this such a task. Apparently, this is the OS that 'old people/people who don't have strong file preferences/people who love to hack' find easy, the one they ought to use. But for me, the workflow has been a nightmare. Then even if I put in the time to hack this thing right, what, I have to be wary of future updates?

Maybe this is just the growing pains of a lifelong PC user throwing themselves headlong into a very different OS. I don't know.

 

[firestarter]

How long would that take for 355 gigs?

Not long.

Use 'Max'. Leave it overnight. Done.

I don't get it... I feel like the OS is built in a way to hold its users back from doing what they want to do. I resent Apple for making this such a task.

Sell your machine now and go back to Windows then.

Apple optimises several pre-defined workflows to perfection... and that's were the ease of use comes from. Great engineering, and lots of underlying open standards too.

If you want to do something different, then you're missing the whole point.