Full-Screen Album Art in iTunes

If there’s one thing that bums me out, it’s an MP3 without big beautiful cover art. Like all y’all old-school LP guys, having high-quality album cover art on full display is part of the listening experience.  I’ve just spent the past couple years digitizing my entire LP and CD collections, then tracking down the best-possible cover art for every single one of the 5,000+ albums I ended up with — even if it meant photographing or scanning covers by hand.

With all that work done, I wanted to find a good way to display cover art on the Mac as cleanly as possible, without the clutter of other app windows in the way, and ideally without turning to 3rd-party software.

At first, I thought CoverFlow would be the One True Way, but  in practice, CoverFlow can’t be trusted. I find it constantly gets stuck on a cover, and no amount of toggling the “Now Playing / Selected” widget or switching between List View and CoverFlow view will coax it out of its rut.

Here’s the recipe I came up with – let me know if you have a better one:

0) Make sure all of your music has the highest-quality album art possible :) CoverScout is an awesome tool if you want to automate/simplify the process somewhat.

1) Make sure the Now Playing / Selected preview window is showing by clicking the disclosure triangle at the bottom left.

2) Double-click on the album cover to open it in a new, detached window (never knew you could do that, amiright?)

3) Use Mission Control to move that window to a new desktop. If you’re not already using multiple desktops, just drag the detached cover art window to a blank space near the top of Mission Control.

4) Switch to the new desktop and maximize the Now Playing window.

Now, to see your full-screen album art quickly, just switch to the other desktop. There are several ways to do this quickly in OS X, but I prefer either the three-finger sideswipe (if you have a laptop or trackpad) or Ctrl+Arrow[Left/Right].

Yes, there’s a small bit of setup, but since Mountain Lion restores all windows to their previous state after a reboot, you never have to do it again.

BTW, the cover art display isn’t just pretty – it’s functional too. Hover over the art and a controller will appear, giving you full scrub / skip / pause control, and letting you see the name of the current track and album.

Bonus: Remote Control
The really bad-ass thing is that you don’t have to do this from the Mac where the iTunes library lives – if you have a media server Mac that’s separate from the one you do your work on, you can run it all on a  by remote control, via iTunes Home Sharing.  I do my work on a MacBook Pro from the living room, which talks to iTunes on a Mac Mini server in the office which houses the music collection. The MacBook’s instance of iTunes in turn sends its output via AirPlay to an AirPort Express connected to the stereo across the living room from me. It’s a big crazy triangle, but the experience is completely smooth and user friendly (much nicer than the old VNC solution I used to use). If you would prefer to use a VNC client, I can’t recommend Jolly’s highly enough – the elastic screen feature is trippy, but does an amazing job of compensating for the fact that you might be controlling a huge monitor from a small one.

The History of Misheard Lyrics

A lifetime ago, I created The Archive of Misheard Lyrics, where people could go to log all of the lyrics they *thought* they had always known, only to to discover in some embarrassing circumstance how wrong they had been all along. I later sold the site, and the purchaser destroyed most of the functionality and gave it the current hideous design. I’m pretty much embarrassed to attach my name to it these days.

Anyway, just stumbled on this video of a group playing/acting out a few dozen of the most popular misheard lyrics from the site – pretty funny.

Via Laughing Squid:

“Experimental video musical group cdza has created History of Misheard Lyrics | Opus No. 13, a live-performed music video montage that covers 70 years of misheard song lyrics. It features the vocals of Ryan Melia and Lora Lee Gayer and Michael on bass.”

Einstein on the Beach

Notes and thoughts on last night’s performance of Phillip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach.” Includes a “Listening experience flow-chart” by my lovely wife.

“Her head shook rapidly from side to side, vibrating  like a bobble-head doll, as if stuck in a permanent speed-reading trance.”

Embedded Link

Einstein on the Beach | Stuck Between Stations
Listening to a Phillip Glass piece is more like studying a stained glass window than listening to music in the conventional sense – a passing glance would only tell part of the story, while the full p…

Perhaps You Are Made of Glass? Laurie Anderson @ Zellerbach

“Of all the things that ever could have happened… most of them didn’t.”

Notes from last night’s amazing Laurie Anderson performance – at 65 she’s mellower, more focused on storytelling than on avante garde gimmicks, but still puts on a fantastic show. Notes on the show at Stuck Between Stations:

Perhaps You Are Made of Glass? Laurie Anderson, Zellerbach
It’s been 26 years since I last watched Laurie Anderson perform (“Big Science”). I was much younger, and so was she. The audience at the time was composed mostly of new wave/punkers with a literary be…

Cut of revenue for musicians has always been tough

Cut of revenue for musicians has always been tough, but streaming audio (Spotify, Rhapsody, Rdio, Mog) is the beginning of the end for artists’ ability to make money from their work. Business Insider has updated their famous 2010 infographic for 2012, and the reality isn’t pretty. Watch the bubble grow.

via Lee Eichelberger

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Streaming Music Has Made It All But Impossible For Musicians To Earn Minimum Wage
Except for Rihanna.

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Roger Oh Double Oh Forty Oh

Just rediscovered this after a decade, thought I’d post so there’s a record of it before it’s lost to history. This was before I switched to ukulele. And when I had more hair. Roger’s 50th just rolled around, and a different group of guys got together to do a different song for his half-century. Unfortunately, we had a few technical difficulties, and don’t have good video to show for that effort. So let’s just relive the past.

Sadly, Matthew Sperry (shown here on bass and singing with gleeful abandon) died tragically in a car-on-bike accident a couple of years later. He is memorialized at matthewsperry.org.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgkkjNGdBjY&list=UUO3IR9VRRYVdnIvYDTztZow&index=1&feature=plcp

Continue reading “Roger Oh Double Oh Forty Oh”

Screencast/tour of ~300 digitized LPs

Took most of 2011 to tackle the stack of 500 LPs I’ve been wanting to digitize forever. Turned out that a lot of them I had re-purchased as CD or MP3 in the meantime, and those didn’t need encoding. And some were just too far gone to be worth copying. As for the rest, I used the workflow I outlined at the beginning of the year. Got really anal about having good cover art for everything; what I couldn’t find online I photographed myself. Here’s a quick (silent) tour of the covers.

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