DockArt

[jere7my]

Last night, I posted to comp.sys.mac.apps, asking if anyone knew of any apps that would display the cover art for the current iTunes song in the Dock. Clutter does something similar, but it downloads the art from Amazon every time; I wanted something that would pull the art directly from iTunes.

None existed. But, before 24 hours had elapsed, Gregory Weston had written and posted one. Works like a charm. And here it is.

I'm impressed. And I even get a credit in the ReadMe.

Comments

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

but how do you get the cover art *into* itunes?

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

First, you go to Amazon and find a nice big picture of the cover art. Then you drag the picture to the little artwork window in the lower left corner of iTunes. (If that window is not showing, click the fourth button along, with the triangle and bar in it.) Make sure the bar above that window says "Selected Song" (instead of "Now Playing"), and the cover art will be copied to whatever songs you have selected.

(Clutter (http://www.sprote.com/clutter/) automates this process, and is absolutely vital if you're going to do a lot of this. It finds the images at Amazon and copies them to iTunes for you, though sometimes it can't find the right art and you have to go a-hunting.)

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

cool! thanks.

One nit

[(Anonymous)]

"Then you drag the picture to the little artwork window in the lower left corner of iTunes."

Greg here. If you go the manual route, as I find out while testing DockArt, dragging straight from the browser to iTunes will give you an embedded image in Apple's PICT format. It'll almost certainly be much larger than the JPG, GIF or PNG that is really on the page. Not a lot compared to the 1MB/min of your songs, but if you've got a large library the extra 40k-or-so per track adds up.

So while it's a bit more tedious, it works better if you drag the image to your desktop so it's saved locally and then drag _that_ into the iTunes image well. The difference between dragging an image and dragging a file eliminates the issue.

The automated tools should obviate the whole thing, though.

Thanks for the kind words here and on Usenet, jere7my. I ran across this while googling to see if it was getting mentioned anywhere. There's a new version coming out real-soon-now that offers the option to supplant iTunes' icon instead of consuming more dock space with its own.

[miraling.livejournal.com]

Darn...I'm assuming there's no Windows analogue of this Clutter thing?

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Not as far as I know. Alas.