Flipping Through Covers

Itunes Artwork2 Playing around with the new iTunes Artwork screensaver in Tiger — generates an array of all albums in your collection for which you have cover art, randomizes, throws them up in a grid, flips/replaces covers at random. Sounds a bit silly, but in reality feels like a sort of reclamation — the vanishing romance of thumbing through piles of LPs, cover art scattered over the rug. Feels good.

Of course you quickly realize how little of your MP3 collection even has cover art. Clutter solves that, but grows your database by about 1MB per album (art is added to metadata of each track) and it would take weeks to add cover art to an entire collection.

You need to use the CLI screencapture utility in OS X to shoot screensavers. Be sure to silence it with the -x flag — without that it hoarks forth an ungodly loud noise when it snaps.

sleep 25; screencapture -x cap6.png

Interesting that Apple has switched from PDF to PNG as the screen capture file format with Tiger. Would be nice if they offered a preference for that.

Music: Tim Buckley :: Gypsy Woman

2 Replies to “Flipping Through Covers”

  1. I just upgraded to tiger and in the man page for screencapture I see this:
    -t <format> Image format to create, default is png.

    I can’t remember seeing it before.

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