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iTunes 7 does this now:
I've spent far too much time over the last two days hunting down cover art for my more obscure songs, and writing AppleScripts to muck with naming conventions. Album art has significant cultural and aesthetic value, and we've lost some of that in the move to rip rip rip our music to our hard drives; iTunes 7 is doing a nice job of bringing it back. I really like being able to flip through the sleeves, which I haven't really done since the days of vinyl.
iTunes also keeps track of a tune's "skip count" now, so you can see how many times you're skipping over a particular track, and create smart playlists that (for instance) list all the tracks you've skipped over more than five times, in case you feel the urge to trim your library. And there is no longer a split-second gap between tracks, so you can listen to all of Dark Side of the Moon without cringing.
Finally, you can now click on the "Album" header to switch between sorting by "Album," "Album by Artist," and "Album by Year." The behavior is a little complex. "Album by Artist" first separates out all your albums flagged as "Compilations"—excepting those which have only one Artist or Album Artist—and shuffles them to the bottom of the list, then sorts the rest of your library by artist and then by album. "Album by Year" does the same thing, but arranges an artist's albums chronologically, and sorts the compilations chronologically at the end. (If various tracks on an album have different dates, it sorts by the date of the first imported, which is usually track 1.) I would greatly prefer to be able to define my own sorting rules, but this is a step in the right direction.
I should, perhaps, put in a plug-in plug again: DockArt by Greg Weston replaces your iTunes dock icon with the cover art. I predict it'll suddenly become more popular, now that iTunes finds cover art automatically if you ask it to. And he had it compatible with iTunes 7 within 6 hours of me noticing it was broken.
[Edit: I see that TV shows purchased from ITMS are 640x480 now—nearly DVD resolution, and up from 320x240. This makes me a lot more likely to buy them. Yay Apple.]
I've spent far too much time over the last two days hunting down cover art for my more obscure songs, and writing AppleScripts to muck with naming conventions. Album art has significant cultural and aesthetic value, and we've lost some of that in the move to rip rip rip our music to our hard drives; iTunes 7 is doing a nice job of bringing it back. I really like being able to flip through the sleeves, which I haven't really done since the days of vinyl.
iTunes also keeps track of a tune's "skip count" now, so you can see how many times you're skipping over a particular track, and create smart playlists that (for instance) list all the tracks you've skipped over more than five times, in case you feel the urge to trim your library. And there is no longer a split-second gap between tracks, so you can listen to all of Dark Side of the Moon without cringing.
Finally, you can now click on the "Album" header to switch between sorting by "Album," "Album by Artist," and "Album by Year." The behavior is a little complex. "Album by Artist" first separates out all your albums flagged as "Compilations"—excepting those which have only one Artist or Album Artist—and shuffles them to the bottom of the list, then sorts the rest of your library by artist and then by album. "Album by Year" does the same thing, but arranges an artist's albums chronologically, and sorts the compilations chronologically at the end. (If various tracks on an album have different dates, it sorts by the date of the first imported, which is usually track 1.) I would greatly prefer to be able to define my own sorting rules, but this is a step in the right direction.
I should, perhaps, put in a plug-in plug again: DockArt by Greg Weston replaces your iTunes dock icon with the cover art. I predict it'll suddenly become more popular, now that iTunes finds cover art automatically if you ask it to. And he had it compatible with iTunes 7 within 6 hours of me noticing it was broken.
[Edit: I see that TV shows purchased from ITMS are 640x480 now—nearly DVD resolution, and up from 320x240. This makes me a lot more likely to buy them. Yay Apple.]
