� Alison Rediscovers Her Inner Brainless Bimbo | Main | That Pesky Album Art �

May 30, 2003

"New iTunes for Old"

It's apparently warmer in London than in Tenerife today. The children are splashing about merrily in the garden, the hammock is inviting, I have a rare guilt-free day off; so I'm fiddling with iTunes.

Marianne and Jonathan in the paddling pool

Doing our bit for water conservation

If you haven't downloaded the update to iTunes yet, you might wish to copy iTunes 4.0 to a different folder; 4.01 has disabled the sharing over IP. When you do update, you'll want to do so on your entire network at once, because the sharing over Rendezvous feature, which remains, requires the shared libraries to be running the same version of iTunes.

I'm ripping my way through the large pile of CDs I've bought at various branches of Fopp in the last week. I now have a small manageable pile of ether. Fopp is clearly going to be a major money sink; their business case appears to rest on the theory that people will buy many CDs at a fiver each. Works for me, and the London branch is quite near my coffee shop.

I like Clutter, a little program that sucks the cover art for whatever you're playing from iTunes or Amazon, displays it in a 'What's Playing' window, and puts an appropriate icon in the doc. It also allows you to leave a pile of virtual CD cases lying around your desktop, to remind you of music you might want to play soon. Double-clicking them launches the album in iTunes; and helpfully, you can associate artwork with radio stations and playlists as well. Clutter only finds about the art for about half of my music, though (a defect in Amazon, not Clutter), so I'm supplementing it with Google image searches. The virtual covers can be as large as you like; so if you have a nice big display and a distressing penchant for prog rock, you can relive the days of 12" album art.

The web fails me completely on a cover image for 'Rosemary's Sister' by Huw and Tony Williams. It's not even a very rare album. This is the first cover of proper music I've not managed to find at all, though some of the images are a bit small for the window in iTunes. I may have to resort to scanning the physical cover.

The next task is clearly lyrics.

Posted by Alison Scott at May 30, 2003 12:39 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Chris O'Shea at May 30, 2003 02:26 PM

Nope; I found both of those. It's just gotta be the cover, you know. Especially as I *have* the album, so all I have to do is find the CD and scan in the art. Don't hold your breath. I do also have "live" and "Unplugged and Unrelated" to add at some point, though they're not ripped yet.

Posted by: Alison Scott at May 30, 2003 03:33 PM

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