12 ms·

Apple doesn't care about album cover art

234 points by glitchdout 6y ago

sneak 6y ago
At the risk of going off topic: it feels like modern day Apple's priorities have shifted a lot from the Apple I grew up with, and many things they used to put front-and-center are falling by the wayside, out of neglect. This isn't some generic "they don't care about the mac anymore" refrain, but I think there is a major sea change underway at the company. I think I will write soon about all of the hints, as I see them.
- pyinstallwoes 6y ago
  Oh for sure, I used to still think they had the design DNA but nope... it's definitely gone.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I have heard reports from current and former Apple staff of a brain drain in progress there. It's not really a great place to work.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    It's almost as if, top-notch attention-to-detail doesn't scale automatically. Your company going from $4B->$40B->$400B->$2T is going to evolve culturally speaking, and it seems the effort to instill quality over the bottom $line is simply not possibly unless you choose to "leave money on the table". I've noticed Apple does best PR wise when they do the latter, but it's hard for me to find examples of them doing that recently.
- undefined1 6y ago
  what are they changing to?
  - sneak 6y ago
    It takes a huge amount of time and money to go to the insane lengths of Apple-ism that the company is known for. I would venture to say that 80% of that doesn't translate to an increase in revenue. How many people bought a 2019 Mac Pro because of the speaker inside of it? They're slowly but steadily trimming this "waste". The products are becoming merely "great", but no longer insanely so. The age of Sane Apple, perhaps. Apple seems to be significantly more focused on building revenue (especially from services) than on building the most insanely great things that can possibly exist (with revenue as a side effect). Another example is the fact that they introduced an end-to-end encrypted messaging system that rapidly became a widespread standard... then backdoored it for the FBI (via the non-end-to-end-encrypted iCloud Backup). That isn't so much an indicator of Apple's new values... except that the KB article about what is and isn't e2e encrypted in iCloud is designed to deliberately confuse and mislead people into thinking the situation is better than it is. That's very un-Apple, if you ask me. Apple used to be "the computer for the rest of us", the pirate-flag-flyers. Now they primarily make Facebook/Candy Crush client hardware. This comment is obviously a massive oversimplification, and I want to write properly on it in detail and at length soon.
- nmstoker 6y ago
  It seems like a company that has had many eras, so it's more subtle than the "good old days vs bad new focus" outlook. They're not afraid to reinvent themselves and sometimes that brings benefits and sometimes it ditches things people value. The sense of always moving towards a more and more "walled garden" view never fills me with delight and their UI ideals are nowhere near the 90s peak but they do get a heck of a lot of other things right.
marshmallow_12 6y ago
This distresses me greatly. Many otherwise great UI's and devices needlessly waste screen space and display tiny album art. Why? who wants a small image in the center, surrounded by vast, boring block colour. But even worse is Apple who seem to have taken a decisive step backwards. "let's take a great display choice and break it!" Apple execs must have discussed excitedly, probably after several beers.
- rob74 6y ago
  Why? Because some misguided designer thought it looked cool (after all, if you are a UX designer, it's your job to suggest sommething different, saying "the app looks and works great as it is, let's not change anything" doesn't quite cut it), and nobody else involved cared enough to challenge this decision?
fortran77 6y ago
This related issue: > And why can’t I see the album name anywhere on the UI? ↩ is also a problem. Apple is trying hard to destroy the concept of an "Album"
- the_local_host 6y ago
  I cannot stand the way that albums on an iphone/mac get fragmented into separate albums when there are tracks with guest artists. E.g. for Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, I see tracks 1,2,3,6,8,9,10,12,13,15,17,19. Track 16 is on another album by "Outkast featuring Kelis." I just want the tracks that are on the CD to show up together as the same album.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    That's what the "Album Artist" field is for.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    It is because of this exact tagging issue that I never let iTunes 'manage' my library. They'd take files in perfectly labeled folders and move everything into something resembling the structure of their database.
  - ajb92 6y ago
    This is a symptom of their larger problem with maintaining and overreaching when it comes to metadata. I've had scenarios where an album of music I manually added to my library (as MP3s) has had its metadata mutilated to the point where the songs were spread across several incomplete albums (differing releases of the same album) each incomplete, including some songs becoming standalone tracks from compilation albums I had never heard of. They won't just _leave it alone_.
    - sumtechguy 6y ago
      Getting metadata right is honestly an issue that has been there for a long time. ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 are basically what you have to work with. Many programs also use custom TXXX or DIV tags to embed whatever into. So even if you get it right in on prog it is a disaster in another. ID3v2.4 fixes many of the issues. But very few progs use it or default to 2.3. Plus the way an album can be sliced and diced for metadata is truly breathtaking. Then add into that some of these programs try to use some form of acoustic id to try to find where it belongs. Which does what you are talking about. So you resort to setting the file read only so the program will not mess with the tags. Then on top of that many of the online sources can be in bad shape for bands or releases. AC/DC is most certainly not alternative. But it is tagged that way in some databases. So data quality goes all the way from 'someone spent a lot of time getting this right' to 'someone uploaded whatever was in their mp3 library and called it a day'. Also even the data printed on the pages that came with it may have spelling errors and differences in spelling for individual tracks and artists. Some artists have 3-4 different aliases which one do you put it under without messing everything up or leave it stand alone and you forget you even had it. Also differing releases is a pain too. Some albums have 40+ releases. Which one do you actually have. Does it really matter?
dcgoss 6y ago
The album art is more than sufficiently large on their modern screen sizes.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  the article is discussing an SE. The author specifically complains that it's not big enough. And anyway, that's not a good reason to waste so much space. Maybe it can be argued that it makes the overall UI of ios appear neater and more uniform, but i'm not going to state that case.
nasalgoat 6y ago
Apple quality and design, especially in UI, has been steadily declining for over a decade. This is just another example. Unfortunately the alternatives are even worse.
- tempodox 6y ago
  Steve Jobs isn't there any more to slap it in their face and tell 'em it sucks.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    Jobs wasn't immune from the occasional bad choice. (Before you ask, I have personal knowledge that this was his choice.) http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
    - 1-6 6y ago
      The QuickTime Player wasn't that bad considering that all other media players like boxes and the best 2nd place looked like RealPlayer. Taste shifts over time and display technologies also add to our preference. It may be bad today but back then, we wanted the UI on computers to look like real electronics with a 'brushed aluminum' material finish.
      - CharlesW 6y ago
        Having been near the epicenter of it, this was more than just a "skeuomorphism was in" thing. It was a complete aesthetic and functional nightmare at the time. Apple employees, customers, developers, and press were horrified. https://www.salon.com/1999/09/30/quicktime/ https://www.salon.com/1999/09/30/quicktime/ That being said, I understand that sometimes one needs to push boundaries of taste in order to make advances. I'm just sad that QuickTime Player had to be one of the sacrificial pikes upon which skeuomorphism died.
    - ksec 6y ago
      Yes, plenty of it. But one of the gift I think Steve had was to completely change course once he acknowledge something as wrong. Whether that is persuaded by someone he trust or the market. Now no one at Apple has that intuition.
pil4rin 6y ago
Yeah, looks like a device specific issue wrapped with a preference on margin around the artwork. Apple could shut this guy up by expanding the album art full screen when tapped in the player view.
paxys 6y ago
It's weird complaining that you can't see details in the album art anymore, when in terms of raw size and resolution the art on a newer iPhone today is larger than it was on an iPod Touch in 2012 even if it doesn't stretch all the way to the edge of the screen. I personally like Spotify's approach to evolving album art, where artists can use full-screen video clips or other visualizations (mostly taken from their music videos).
rchaud 6y ago
Glad to see one of my pet peeves finally get some notice! I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual 'art', and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player. I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px. That would take up a lot of the screen's real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen. Digital album
- zinckiwi 6y ago
  As screens have grown they’ve mostly grown vertically. If anything it should be easier to display a full-width album cover and still have plenty of room for controls and other UI chrome.
josefresco 6y ago
FWIW YouTube Music does a good job showing album art (which I appreciate)
- fireattack 6y ago
  What? It looks almost exactly like what OP shows: https://i.imgur.com/AFvhdNB.png https://i.imgur.com/AFvhdNB.png (Except the "it becomes smaller when pausing" part, of course) I'm not saying it's bad and IMO it's fine, just that I don't think it's really different from Apple music app.
  - josefresco 6y ago
    It's full screen, edge-to-edge in iOS (iPhone 11). In landscape it's acutally 100+% of the screen (which isn't great) I also use in Chrome where 40ish% of the screen is album art.
    - fireattack 6y ago
      Oh, that makes sense. Sorry for assuming they're the same as Android's.
doomlaser 6y ago
Static album cover art is more nebulous in the streaming age. What's interesting is the different approaches users and musical groups have taken to accompanying video on platforms like YouTube. There is not yet a de facto standard to replace the static square image of yesteryear, but there are a lot of interesting one-offs.
- vardaro 6y ago
  Which is a shame. I can think of an handful of records that sound exactly like their cover art and I believe that detail helps tie the record together
- rchaud 6y ago
  Animated cover art is here: https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/10/apple-music-adding-animated-album-artwork-with-ios-14-3-and-macos-big-sur-11-1/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/10/apple-music-adding-animated-a... However, it still feels very limited. They're all looping cinegraphs, they don't 'do' anything. For an example of a genuinely imaginative liner notes experience, check out the floppy disk that came with Billy Idol's ambitious 1993 effort "Cyberpunk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjl6As2lRGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjl6As2lRGU
gabagool 6y ago
Maybe this is my fault for not moving to Apple Music, but the iOS Music app, subjectively, is total crap ever since iOS 9. The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs/Artists/Albums/Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer). Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.
- yarcob 6y ago
  It doesn't go away with Apple Music, they just shove their explore features in your face, and the experience for listening to your favorite artists still sucks.
  - celeritascelery 6y ago
    And whenever you quit Apple Music, it will delete all your playlists, even if they only had music you owned and created before you signed up.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  You can still add (under Library) Composer as one of the selection options, click Edit in the top right. However, my problem was (was it in iOS 9?) when they moved Downloaded from a permanently set toggle switch to a folder you selected. Which brought you to the exact same view as Library but with only the music on your device. And if you leave the app you may or may not end up in that same view when you return. It made more sense as a setting that you had to deliberately set or unset, not as a "view" of your content where the default was to use more bandwidth and play things you'd deliberately deleted.
- rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
  Soundjam MP was great stuff on my Twentieth Anniversary Mac back in the day. iTunes is nearly unusable.
- tehwebguy 6y ago
  > Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX. Nope, I just finished a 3 month trial and it never got any easier. There is no way the person in charge of this app actually uses it day to day (or maybe they've just never used Spotify?) My biggest grievances: - Wouldn't be ready to play what I was last listening to immediately, esp if data service was low (Spotify seems always ready to go, even if I haven't explicitly downloaded a song to cache) - Awful recommendations -- Kept playing songs from the first Tyler, the Creator album when I was listening to vapor/synthwave radio (I like that album but they do not go together!)
jordanpg 6y ago
Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube. What I do care about is a current "About" tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for/by the artist. Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the "vector" needs to shift elsewhere. Good example is the backgrounds created by Cryo Chamber for their YT postings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc
- coldpie 6y ago
  Yeah my first though on reading the article title was "neither do I." I'd find a little information about the album (date; what number album it is from that artist; collaborators) way more useful than the art.
- mmglr 6y ago
  > Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. Maybe cover art is less meaningful *to you*. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful. Today UX/UI teams are making decisions for everyone and not allowing anyone to deviate from those decisions. Less and less apps offer users a choice via a settings UI. To me the fix is simple allow users to customize their UI.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > Maybe cover art is less meaningful to you. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful. The author admits they're in a niche: > The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about cover art. So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Like most people these days I listen to music for the music, not the physical media artwork.
    - mmglr 6y ago
      > So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Unless you are on the Apple Music team and have access to some study how would you know that?
mushufasa 6y ago
Eh, I see this more as a shift in consumer design patterns overall. At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books. Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music. Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.
- amelius 6y ago
  Meanwhile lots of folks are going back to vinyl.
  - echelon 6y ago
    The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. You don't have to hate streaming to enjoy vinyl, and vice versa. I happen to enjoy both and treat them as different experiences. I'm fine if the expectations around digital change as long as it's still accessible.
    - crocsarecool 6y ago
      I do the same thing! I find that with vinyl I’m more likely to listen to the whole album. With streaming, I’ll hear a song I like, remember another song, hop around all over the place.
    - rory 6y ago
      This was (is?) the idea behind Paper & Plastick Records [0] in the MP3 heyday. The "paper" is a download code, and the "plastick" is a vinyl record along with it. Pretty fun concept IMO. [0] http://www.paperandplastick.com/ http://www.paperandplastick.com/
  - barnaclejive 6y ago
allenu 6y ago
Sadly, I think it's just that the world has moved on from albums as "coveted" goods that you treasure to just being commodities. With music streaming services, each album isn't as precious as the old days where you'd actually purchase a CD, a cassette, or a vinyl record. There's just so much music out there now, and so readily available. IMHO, as a result, how albums are presented is now just an afterthought.
- ewmiller 6y ago
  Check out discogs.com. Most music listeners don't covet their physical media anymore, but there are still millions of people globally who buy and trade vinyl, and even CDs. Anecdotally, I have a friend who collects rare underground CDs from the mid-2000's because vinyl hadn't been revived yet and digital streaming wasn't big yet, so some bands who were only active during that time only ever put out CDs. And personally I have a few dozen vinyl albums that came out in the last 10 years. With the vinyl revival, I expect album art will still continue to be important to niche music collectors, and any artist who releases in full-album format (many artists just do singles now, so that won't apply to them I'm sure).
  - allenu 6y ago
    Yeah, interestingly I've been buying vinyl from independent artists when I can, and usually they'll include codes to download the digital format. I finally bought a record player a few months ago and have been enjoying the experience of just focusing on playing one album at a time.
brandonmenc 6y ago
Worse imo, the artist listing using photos of the band or artist as the image instead of a cover of an album - which makes it useless for visual scanning.
woodruffw 6y ago
Spotify on the desktop is also guilty of this: the default cover art view is microscopic; clicking the "expand" button brings it up to a merely small view.
- res0nat0r 6y ago
  Agree. But I think the overall reason is obvious: customers don't care about album art either. If they did (and used their buying power to show this), Spotify / Apple would change their products.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    I care about album art and am frustrated with both Apple and Spotify. Does anyone have suggestions where I should direct my buying power so I can listen to music and view high res album art?
    - res0nat0r 6y ago
      Buy vinyl on discogs.com, or vinyl from any of your other favorite online retailer.
      - yarcob 6y ago
        I buy Vinyl, but most new Vinyl releases suck. They just stuff a bunch of songs on 3 or 4 sides that end up half empty, so you need to flip the record all the time.
        res0nat0r 6y ago
        Vinyl has always had this shorter time length. > A standard 12-inch 33 RPM vinyl record can have a playtime of roughly 22 minutes per side for a total of 44 minutes. A 7-inch 45 RPM record can fit approximately 5 minutes per side for a total of 10 minutes. Generally, any longer, the sound quality would start to deteriorate. https://peakvinyl.com/record-playtimes/ https://peakvinyl.com/record-playtimes/
nmeofthestate 6y ago
If you think this is bad you should see how terrible the photo app "Instagram" is for viewing photographs.
brianberns 6y ago
Another minor beef: Rounded corners for an album cover image don't make sense, either historically or aesthetically. Just give us the full image please, Apple.
dirtybird04 6y ago
At least it's static. Spotify keeps pushing music videos as cover art for singles and it's annoying as hell. If I wanted to see a video, I would've used other platforms.
yarcob 6y ago
Both Spotify and Apple Music make it really hard to see album art. It seems they just don't care about it. They show tiny thumbnails, and there's no way to make it bigger. But it's not like artists care either. 99% of artist websites just have low resolution pictures as well. I recently bought an LP, mainly for the album art, and when I unwrapped it at home I realised that they apparently sent 72 DPI files to the printer. I just don't get it. They make all this elaborate artwork, and then they only let you see thumbnails.
_jstreet 6y ago
What's the alternative option? Stretch and pixelate the album art so it's larger on the screen? Personally, I wouldn't use a music player to view album art.
- glitchdout 6y ago
  The alternative is doing what the iPod does.
GhostVII 6y ago
Wow that blog is awesome, mostly random short posts like this.
scop 6y ago
I was listening to James Hetfield on the Joe Rogan Experience a few months back and he highlighted an experienced I completely forgot existed: buying albums solely based on album art. I remember as a kid walking through the aisles of albums, floating around certain genres, and deciding on what to purchase purely because of an album cover. Band I had never heard of, well, look at that cover!
- gagege 6y ago
  I still do this on Spotify. Scroll through the new releases and if a cover looks interesting, I give it a listen. Having grown up in record stores, I love that I can listen to anything instantly. It's pretty insane actually.
- rchaud 6y ago
  I might do this for the $1 vinyl/CD rack, but never in general. CDs were crazy expensive. We're talking $17.99 in the year 2000 and maybe $9.99 for the cassette. I don't many kids that had money to drop on something based on the art alone. We needed money for magazines and concerts too y'know.
  - scop 6y ago
    Good point. I didn't have that kind of money simply laying around, but I would sometimes save up and pay the $17.99. With that level of risk there was that much more reward, almost a form of gambling. It probably made my young brain give each song a lot more attention than I would have otherwise as I had to make sure I got my investment "back".
    - rchaud 6y ago
      That is true. When I bought an album, I listened to it front and back. Gave several chances to songs that didn't connect with me the first time. Even though that was 20 years ago, I still remember the mediocre songs better than I remember some songs from the recent past that I actually liked.
  - asdff 6y ago
vardaro 6y ago
If you want to appreciate the album art then purchase the LP. A tiny JPEG on AM or Spotify UI is never going to cut it for anybody who is interested in inspecting the cover art. These tools are designed for background listening
msackmann 6y ago
That‘s why I use the sleevenote app, which defaults to showing only the cover as large as possible. They even plan to build a square-screen music player :-D
Animats 6y ago
Albums are so last-cen. In the Apple ecosystem, the unit of sale is the song.
thinnerlizzy 6y ago
I liked iTunes back in the Steve Jobs days when, if album art wasn’t available, in its place it would display the album info on the diagonal against a white background, as if it were an old bootleg with stamped info on a white record sleeve. As a collector/listener of bootlegs I appreciated that little bit of skeuomorphism.
fireattack 6y ago
My pet peeve about album cover art is digital music distributors padding non-square covers with white margins. They look like shit in almost all the UIs that don't have a white background.
robomartin 6y ago
Have they implement the simple idea of respecting the integrity of an album? I have to admit not having messed with music on iPhone for many years because of this. Did it improve? What I mean is: I want to listen to the Brandenburg Concerto or The Wall from start to finish and in order. Not possible for so long I gave up. The other aspect of this was wanting to import a sizable music library from Windows Media consisting of dozens of CD’s I own. A total mess, including the aforementioned problem.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Back in the day, a big differentiator for non-iPod MP3 players was whether they had gapless playback. As a marketing tactic, it worked about as well as Flash compatibility did for early Android devices.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I sympathize in spirit, even if I never used iTunes back in the day, because I refused in principle to pay for digital goods and preferred to buy the CDs and rip them myself. Amazon AutoRip being the sole exception, because that seems to just be a convenience feature for something I was going to do anyway. Compared to the "all-streaming" future, however, sure, I'll take iTunes over that any day.
egypturnash 6y ago
I really hate how little space is used for album art on iOS iTunes, it's even more pathetic if you try to plug an iPad into your stereo and imagine that it would have a nice big image of the album art filling that gorgeous display like it used to do, hahahaha NOPE, you get a crappy little popup that's the same size as the goddamn iPhone player, no cover art you can recognize when you look up from a chair across the room for you! I also hate that despite there being a "lyrics" tag lurking in every track it is never pre-filled when I buy music off of Apple's store, I always have to go visit dodgy lyrics sites and cut and paste. Admittedly this is more a problem with the entire setup for distributing music digitally, I would bet money that even if a musician does stick lyrics into their uploads, it will get stripped out somewhere along the way when it's transcoded into whatever format you're actually buying.
omgJustTest 6y ago
I don't know if there is a term for this already, but [1] really shifted my mindset. Basically if you own the platform / store there is a strong incentive to reduce the ability of products to keep their brand-authority. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...
shadeslayer_ 6y ago
Another takeaway from this post is the album, as a unit of music, falling out of vogue. The album name doesn't show up anywhere on the Spotify/Apple Music UI - you have to go deep into the artist pages (?) to find it. Streaming is the main mode of consuming music for most people, and streaming platforms only care about the number of plays. It is sort of sad, because some of the best pieces of music over the last century have been albums where the songs are tied together in some sort of progression - these are often called concept albums. The Wall, Ziggy Stardust, American Idiot are a few examples that come to mind. Soon there might come a day when nobody actually takes the time to listen to an album from start to finish.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  > Soon there might come a day when nobody actually takes the time to listen to an album from start to finish. The "album" in general has long been an industry contrivance. Most musical acts would be much better served if singles and EPs were the most asked of them in terms of recordings. Because they're trying to fill "albums" (~44 min LPs or ~60 min CDs) there's tons of filler recorded all the time. Some is literal filler pulled from a fakebook and recorded just to put another track on an album. Even with bands I love I can rarely make it through entire albums without skipping at least half the songs. I've been making playlists for decades (mix tapes, then CD-Rs, then iPod playlists). I'd much rather an artist release five good songs as an EP and sell it to me for five bucks. I'll bundle all the EPs together as an "album" if I want.
  - daemin 6y ago
    Well there is a difference in artists that produce a few good songs and then fill the rest of the album with other tracks, and artists that make an entire album be a journey of audio. There's also a lot of albums which are shorter than the full CD size, and a lot which max out the CD length. I think like all art having limitations actually enhances creativity, since it makes the artist cut things out and decide what is truly important. So realistically it can vary on the artist and they should probably customise their delivery based on a particular format. Singles/streaming for individual tracks, vinyl for something slightly longer, CDs for longer, and then maybe USB stick holding a really long flac file for those epic progressive sessions.
ewmiller 6y ago
It's funny that everyone is saying physical media is dying - that might be true for the majority of the population, but for niche music collectors vinyl is making a big comeback. I personally have a growing collection of a few dozen vinyl albums, and I'm 26, so I didn't exactly grow up with that format. I know of at least one artist who did a simplified album cover for their streaming content, but for the physical version of the album you open up the cover and see the full work of art that was left out of the digital version (hard to explain, but you get the idea). I think that's a really cool way to bridge the physical-digital gap and reward people who like collecting albums as a form of physical art.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Physical media is dying. More people getting into vinyl doesn't change the tectonic shift towards digital and streaming that's killed off record stores and vinyl production facilities. Based on the Kickstarters I've seen, it's not easy or cheap for bands to produce a run of vinyl records. And even then, the finished product is expensive to purchase and ship. More so than a T-shirt or a concert ticket, which are higher-margin products by far.
  - asdff 6y ago
    People still buy records even when they cost so much. There's always a decent small market for this stuff that isn't going away, because the equipment lasts forever. The record store in my neighborhood just moved into a larger space.
klelatti 6y ago
Two more gripes: - Why does the album art on the lock screen have to be so small I can barely make out what is playing? - Why can't we have what was on the back of the album too? (And the gatefold for those slightly over indulgent double albums). I would switch in a heartbeat to a service that gave us the latter!
- glitchdout 6y ago
  The lock screen has been annoying me forever and I still forgot to write about it. I've updated the post to mention this. You are absolutely right! As for the back of the album, I agree as well! But I would consider that an extra. Not to mention that I would want to update my album collection to include that back cover, and finding a good front cover is already hard enough
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Thanks and for writing about this in the first place. It actually made be feel much better that I'm not alone in being frustrated about cover art!
dinero_rojo 6y ago
I went into the article expecting someone else to eloquently echo my own thoughts and issues with Apple fucking with my album art, but this is so tame compared to what I’m experiencing. Basically, anyone who’s ever had a greatest hits compilation seems to get their “actual” studio album art replaced with the art of that compilation album at random. For example, off the top of my head, when I’m in the album section for Low, “Heroes”, or Lodger (three David Bowie albums with iconic cover art and even better music), the only image on the page is for a different, shitty compilation album that I’ve never owned, listened to, or have any interest in whatsoever. But things somehow get worse as you’re listening to the album. Each song gets a different cover, seemingly at random. In fact, on “Heroes” alone, an album originally with ten songs (my reissued version has two extra), I have FIVE (5!) different album covers, (one of which is the original, attached to only the fifth, tenth, and bonus songs). I’m so baffled by this decision and literally cannot conceive of anyone, sane or otherwise, asking for this or even thinking that it’s anything other than the worst possible way to handle album art.
- scop 6y ago
  THIS. If anybody at Apple Music is reading this, please prioritize the song from the actual album in search results. It kills me to be bumped into Greatest Hits or compilations so often.
  - creaturemachine 6y ago
    Some things never change. I fought this same fight back in the iTunes days.
coldtea 6y ago
>Apple doesn't care about Album Cover Art Apple? Has anybody (maybe except cover designers) cared about Album Cover Art ever since the transition to CD? And it went downhill with Napster etc. downloads (zero cover art 99% of the time), and later with official stores and streaming (small cover art). Heck, with video games, good TV series, Netflix, internet, social media, youtube, mobile versions of the above, and so on, available the last decade or so, I think people (including the younger demographic) care less about music than ever since the time of Elvis. It's just not as big as a cultural deal anymore as the "escape" it represented for some kind up to the 80s-90s, now it's just one more thing in a whole range of available diversions...
cosmotic 6y ago
"Why isn’t it touching the edges of the screen?" Why should it? One of the reasons it shouldn't touch is because it artificially creates a full-bleed line that separates the content and conveys that they are disconnected when they aren't. "Why can’t I read the album name from the cover?" It can't be read because that's apparently what the artist intended. Many album covers don't even have the album title printed on it. "why can’t I see that The Who took a piss on the monolith?" You can't read everything even on 1:1 replication of the album; but your phone is unconditionally smaller than an actual album cover. "So much creativity, imagination and artistry thrown in the bin for no good reason." It's not throwing anything away; it's making up for numerous design constraints.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  A lot of the talk around getting rid of skeuomorphism was about putting the content front and centre. This seems like the opposite of that. The content is reduced to a little box and the miles of padding that seems "necessary" for a modern UI is the real focus.
  - cosmotic 6y ago
    Skeuomorphism was a largely misguided but not altogether bad design direction. Putting content front and center is a separate design direction that has its own tradeoffs. Massive margins everywhere is another design direction that I think is almost entirely misguided. I'm perfectly happy with the larger of the inset album art screenshots, but the smallest I agree is much too small.
w0mbat 6y ago
Apple legally bought Cover Flow from the inventors, but was sued by patent troll Mirror Worlds LLC. Mirror Worlds was awarded $625.5 million in damages, but Apple appealed and won. Apple then got their own design patent on Cover Flow, but doesn't seem to use it any more.
- rchaud 6y ago
  Didn't even know there was a patent for it. Cover Flow based UI has been possible via Swiper JS for years. https://codepen.io/Pysilla/pen/qBdOVGQ https://codepen.io/Pysilla/pen/qBdOVGQ
Topgamer7 6y ago
My father has been going bonkers about trying to just set his own album art in itunes about the library he maintains of cd rips. The dialog for setting the cover art just doesn't work. You can choose the image, it doesn't report any errors or anything went wrong, but it never sets the album image. The only thing I managed to get to work was if you can find the album in the itunes store, and match all the metadata, you can get the automatic metadata logic to set it properly for you. But he has some esoteric versions of albums, and he wants to use those album covers that itunes doesn't have in their db.
- rchaud 6y ago
  This is the biggest reason why I never owned an iPod long-term. Everything had to be done via iTunes. I owned players from Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony and Creative, and they were all dead simple. Just drag the folders on to the player icon. If the folder contains an image, that's the album art. I owned a ton of unofficial B-sides compilations and live bootlegs, so this was the only way.
- danlugo92 6y ago
  Its been years but have you tried clicking on the album art, after selecring it? It should show up inside thst little window but then you gotta click on it then click ok/save/whateves
  - Topgamer7 6y ago
    I have not, but I will give it a look, thanks!
    - danlugo92 6y ago
      How did it go?
      - Topgamer7 5y ago
        No dice. It does select the image. But after you click on ok nothing happens. So to be clear, we get past the point of selecting the image. After clicking ok to set the selected image to the album, it just does nothing.
twobitshifter 6y ago
I agree that cover art should be shown as large as possible for older works. I remember looking at my Lateralus CD cover art over and over again. It’s sleeve and a series of holograms and transparent pages that really push the limits of what you can do with 2D. In a static image in Apple Music, you won’t ever get the same feeling even if the image was 3 times larger. That said, someone developing art for music no longer has to stick to sheets and 2D, Spotify or Apple Music can provide visualizations and info with the music that can do far more than the album art can. Tool was dealing within the confines of a jewel cd case, but that’s no longer a constraint.
- pram 6y ago
  Yes the little book that came with Lateralus was amazing. It's one of the few rare instances where the CD release is far superior to any subsequent vinyl releases. The Lateralus picture vinyl is neat, but it doesn't present the series of images the way it was intended to be seen.
ungzd 6y ago
At least they don't ban nudity in album cover art (it's very common in cover art). Including in third-party apps like Spotify.
nbzso 6y ago
Design at Apple is lost. But there is no better alternative. Widows is a joke of UI/UX. I blame flat design and fear of skeumorphism trends. Cover art is “emotional” element and it must be visible and beautiful, the idea that you don’t need this is stupid. Actually you need a modern implementation, but for what it would be, I have ideas and exchange them for money, not for likes or karma. :)
Black101 6y ago
Comcast doesn't care about customer name, address, or phone number... they only look at your IP address... Because the last 2 times I asked for credits, they sent it to the wrong account even if I gave them the correct name, address and phone number... once they even sent a technician to the wrong address because I was using their connection when I asked for support.
showdead 6y ago
Oh, the irony. https://iili.io/qkNFd7.png https://iili.io/qkNFd7.png
nreilly 6y ago
I suspect they wouldn't go to the effort in supporting animated cover art[0] if they didn't care. [0] https://music.apple.com/us/album/gigaton/1495371272 https://music.apple.com/us/album/gigaton/1495371272
- austinkhale 6y ago
  Is there a name for this style of animation? Where it’s essentially a static image but with one part animated?
  - jimmux 6y ago
    There's no animation in that link for me, but it sounds like you're describing a cinemagraph.
  - xsmasher 6y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/
- vestrigi 6y ago
  They‘re apparently not caring a whole lot. If you play that a song from that album it will show the static cover art. Also it seems to me like the bigger ‘full screen’ like artworks are reserved to major labels or at least come at a premium.
tomovo 6y ago
I just recenly added cover art to the main window of my Tiny Player for Mac application. It was one of the most requested features. Seems like people like looking at covers while listening. While it is not edge to edge in my case, I’m considering it. https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/ https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/
globular-toast 6y ago
Buy the LP if you care about album art.
cpcallen 6y ago
This post complains about the cover art being too small on iOS, but my complaint is that on macOS iTunes by-album view ditched the art size slider a few years ago, and picked a fixed size that is so big that you can only see about a dozen albums at a time on a 13" laptop screen. This change was so obnoxious I actually looked in to ditching iTunes entirely, but there just wasn't a decent alternative that made editing metadata as easy and would sync with my iPod. Speaking of which...
m463 6y ago
Tesla doesn't either. Tesla can read your music from USB flash drives. This is wonderful, because they have a premium audio system (used to cost $2500) and you could play high-quality music. You could load a drive with FLAC or Apple Lossless music and play it back without MP3 lossiness and artifacts. Yet album art? they do not care. Here's a thread on how the USB player is a buggy unsupported mess. It recently lost the ability to display album art, but there are plenty of other problems (like no playlist support or any number of other problems) https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bug-list.77775/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu... This thread has > 2000 posts going back 5 years and it is updated almost daily.
- grecht 6y ago
  Can you hear the difference between 320 kbit/s mp3 and lossless formats?
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Even if I could I genuinely don't care.
  - tpetry 6y ago
    And more specific: with car audio and on a busy road
  - xmodem 6y ago
    Nope, but storage is so cheap who cares? might as well keep the lossless
  - meshenna 6y ago
    I can't even hear the difference between 128 and 320 :|
    - 1_player 6y ago
      I read somewhere that younger people (I guess Millenials that grew up with Napster) might prefer 128kbps to lossless in blind audio tests because it sound better to them — artifacts and all — as it's what they are used to. Anyone has the source for this?
mastrsushi 6y ago
What a neurotic thing to complain about. "Oh no, my pretty pictures are slightly smaller. Apple doesn't care!".
nodefortytwo 6y ago
In my car when spotify is playing through carplay I get a nice album art on my screen and between my dials, it also uses the colour as a blurred background effect, quite nice and makes me appreciate the art even if i'm (hopefully) not directly looking at it.
IceDane 6y ago
No, neither do I and neither do most people. The music is what matters. If you want to look at the album art, nothing is preventing you from simply finding the picture and staring at it. What a stupid, meaningless thing to rant about and what a stupid meaningless thing to upvote on HN.
- tomovo 6y ago
  Like going to a concert is meaningless because it's just a bit louder and all you do is look at the musicians? Damn that's cold.
- vletal 6y ago
  Such a close minded harsh thing to say.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Is this because the images that they obtained 10-20 years ago are much lower resolution and look pixelated if expanded to the resolution of modern retina screens? I've just looked at Baba O'Reiley on Apple music on my iphone plus 8 and the artwork is as wide as the text/controls.
0df8dkdf 6y ago
This is what happens when a charismatic leader of a tech company dies (2012). Who ever is running the company doesn't have the essence of what created iPod. Just mass consumerism now.
reportgunner 6y ago
You are funding this by continuing to buy apple products.
Tsiklon 6y ago
As a complete aside, I have a fondness for that older layout, back when I used to dip my toe in the jailbreak scene I used a tweak which sampled the album art and changed the layout colours to match the album cover - I think it was called “colourflow” I always wondered why Apple didn’t integrate something similar into the player Here’s a selection of album covers from my screenshots at the time (I used a different font as my system font for several of them): https://imgur.com/a/6rZ3JSY https://imgur.com/a/6rZ3JSY
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
I remember everyone cheering when Apple said they were replacing iTunes with Music.app on OSX. Upgraded recently and I'm shocked at the regression, it actually feels so slow compared to iTunes and having to go into an album page and back to album menu rather than just rolling the album open in-situ like on iTunes is insufferable. Things for music library users are just being made worse and worse to make it more consistent with how Apple Music works. No care if it's better for the user or not.
deorder 6y ago
Apple automatically started using one of our band's album covers as the artist image. When I submitted an new artist logo they turned it down because artist / band logos are not allowed. They only allow faces. The thing is, the band can have anyone as an artist, so we decided to keep the ugly album cover that Apple automatically used as the artist image (which is not even according to their guidelines btw.)
tanseydavid 6y ago
I care deeply about cover art and sneer at any philistine who does not also care deeply about cover art. "For the love of money is the root of all evil"
marstall 6y ago
PSA: I made an alternative Apple Music client that has huuuuge album art - flush to the edges regardless of screen size https://shelf.fm https://shelf.fm
robotresearcher 6y ago
Cover art is a non-trivial part of the album experience. Consider 'Sgt. Pepper', 'Revolver', 'Unknown Pleasures', 'Rage Against the Machine', or 'Nevermind' without thinking of the cover image.

234 points by glitchdout 6y ago

At the risk of going off topic: it feels like modern day Apple's priorities have shifted a lot from the Apple I grew up with, and many things they used to put front-and-center are falling by the wayside, out of neglect. This isn't some generic "they don't care about the mac anymore" refrain, but I think there is a major sea change underway at the company. I think I will write soon about all of the hints, as I see them.

pyinstallwoes 6y ago
Oh for sure, I used to still think they had the design DNA but nope... it's definitely gone.
- sneak 6y ago
  I have heard reports from current and former Apple staff of a brain drain in progress there. It's not really a great place to work.
- r00fus 6y ago
  It's almost as if, top-notch attention-to-detail doesn't scale automatically. Your company going from $4B->$40B->$400B->$2T is going to evolve culturally speaking, and it seems the effort to instill quality over the bottom $line is simply not possibly unless you choose to "leave money on the table". I've noticed Apple does best PR wise when they do the latter, but it's hard for me to find examples of them doing that recently.
undefined1 6y ago
what are they changing to?
- sneak 6y ago
  It takes a huge amount of time and money to go to the insane lengths of Apple-ism that the company is known for. I would venture to say that 80% of that doesn't translate to an increase in revenue. How many people bought a 2019 Mac Pro because of the speaker inside of it? They're slowly but steadily trimming this "waste". The products are becoming merely "great", but no longer insanely so. The age of Sane Apple, perhaps. Apple seems to be significantly more focused on building revenue (especially from services) than on building the most insanely great things that can possibly exist (with revenue as a side effect). Another example is the fact that they introduced an end-to-end encrypted messaging system that rapidly became a widespread standard... then backdoored it for the FBI (via the non-end-to-end-encrypted iCloud Backup). That isn't so much an indicator of Apple's new values... except that the KB article about what is and isn't e2e encrypted in iCloud is designed to deliberately confuse and mislead people into thinking the situation is better than it is. That's very un-Apple, if you ask me. Apple used to be "the computer for the rest of us", the pirate-flag-flyers. Now they primarily make Facebook/Candy Crush client hardware. This comment is obviously a massive oversimplification, and I want to write properly on it in detail and at length soon.
nmstoker 6y ago
It seems like a company that has had many eras, so it's more subtle than the "good old days vs bad new focus" outlook. They're not afraid to reinvent themselves and sometimes that brings benefits and sometimes it ditches things people value. The sense of always moving towards a more and more "walled garden" view never fills me with delight and their UI ideals are nowhere near the 90s peak but they do get a heck of a lot of other things right.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

This distresses me greatly. Many otherwise great UI's and devices needlessly waste screen space and display tiny album art. Why? who wants a small image in the center, surrounded by vast, boring block colour. But even worse is Apple who seem to have taken a decisive step backwards. "let's take a great display choice and break it!" Apple execs must have discussed excitedly, probably after several beers.

rob74 6y ago
Why? Because some misguided designer thought it looked cool (after all, if you are a UX designer, it's your job to suggest sommething different, saying "the app looks and works great as it is, let's not change anything" doesn't quite cut it), and nobody else involved cared enough to challenge this decision?

fortran77 6y ago

This related issue: > And why can’t I see the album name anywhere on the UI? ↩ is also a problem. Apple is trying hard to destroy the concept of an "Album"

the_local_host 6y ago
I cannot stand the way that albums on an iphone/mac get fragmented into separate albums when there are tracks with guest artists. E.g. for Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, I see tracks 1,2,3,6,8,9,10,12,13,15,17,19. Track 16 is on another album by "Outkast featuring Kelis." I just want the tracks that are on the CD to show up together as the same album.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  That's what the "Album Artist" field is for.
- rchaud 6y ago
  It is because of this exact tagging issue that I never let iTunes 'manage' my library. They'd take files in perfectly labeled folders and move everything into something resembling the structure of their database.
- ajb92 6y ago
  This is a symptom of their larger problem with maintaining and overreaching when it comes to metadata. I've had scenarios where an album of music I manually added to my library (as MP3s) has had its metadata mutilated to the point where the songs were spread across several incomplete albums (differing releases of the same album) each incomplete, including some songs becoming standalone tracks from compilation albums I had never heard of. They won't just _leave it alone_.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    Getting metadata right is honestly an issue that has been there for a long time. ID3v2.3 or ID3v2.4 are basically what you have to work with. Many programs also use custom TXXX or DIV tags to embed whatever into. So even if you get it right in on prog it is a disaster in another. ID3v2.4 fixes many of the issues. But very few progs use it or default to 2.3. Plus the way an album can be sliced and diced for metadata is truly breathtaking. Then add into that some of these programs try to use some form of acoustic id to try to find where it belongs. Which does what you are talking about. So you resort to setting the file read only so the program will not mess with the tags. Then on top of that many of the online sources can be in bad shape for bands or releases. AC/DC is most certainly not alternative. But it is tagged that way in some databases. So data quality goes all the way from 'someone spent a lot of time getting this right' to 'someone uploaded whatever was in their mp3 library and called it a day'. Also even the data printed on the pages that came with it may have spelling errors and differences in spelling for individual tracks and artists. Some artists have 3-4 different aliases which one do you put it under without messing everything up or leave it stand alone and you forget you even had it. Also differing releases is a pain too. Some albums have 40+ releases. Which one do you actually have. Does it really matter?

dcgoss 6y ago

The album art is more than sufficiently large on their modern screen sizes.

marshmallow_12 6y ago
the article is discussing an SE. The author specifically complains that it's not big enough. And anyway, that's not a good reason to waste so much space. Maybe it can be argued that it makes the overall UI of ios appear neater and more uniform, but i'm not going to state that case.

nasalgoat 6y ago

Apple quality and design, especially in UI, has been steadily declining for over a decade. This is just another example. Unfortunately the alternatives are even worse.

tempodox 6y ago
Steve Jobs isn't there any more to slap it in their face and tell 'em it sucks.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  Jobs wasn't immune from the occasional bad choice. (Before you ask, I have personal knowledge that this was his choice.) http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
  - 1-6 6y ago
    The QuickTime Player wasn't that bad considering that all other media players like boxes and the best 2nd place looked like RealPlayer. Taste shifts over time and display technologies also add to our preference. It may be bad today but back then, we wanted the UI on computers to look like real electronics with a 'brushed aluminum' material finish.
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      Having been near the epicenter of it, this was more than just a "skeuomorphism was in" thing. It was a complete aesthetic and functional nightmare at the time. Apple employees, customers, developers, and press were horrified. https://www.salon.com/1999/09/30/quicktime/ https://www.salon.com/1999/09/30/quicktime/ That being said, I understand that sometimes one needs to push boundaries of taste in order to make advances. I'm just sad that QuickTime Player had to be one of the sacrificial pikes upon which skeuomorphism died.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Yes, plenty of it. But one of the gift I think Steve had was to completely change course once he acknowledge something as wrong. Whether that is persuaded by someone he trust or the market. Now no one at Apple has that intuition.

pil4rin 6y ago

Yeah, looks like a device specific issue wrapped with a preference on margin around the artwork. Apple could shut this guy up by expanding the album art full screen when tapped in the player view.

paxys 6y ago

It's weird complaining that you can't see details in the album art anymore, when in terms of raw size and resolution the art on a newer iPhone today is larger than it was on an iPod Touch in 2012 even if it doesn't stretch all the way to the edge of the screen. I personally like Spotify's approach to evolving album art, where artists can use full-screen video clips or other visualizations (mostly taken from their music videos).

rchaud 6y ago

Glad to see one of my pet peeves finally get some notice! I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual 'art', and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player. I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px. That would take up a lot of the screen's real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen. Digital album

zinckiwi 6y ago
As screens have grown they’ve mostly grown vertically. If anything it should be easier to display a full-width album cover and still have plenty of room for controls and other UI chrome.

josefresco 6y ago

FWIW YouTube Music does a good job showing album art (which I appreciate)

fireattack 6y ago
What? It looks almost exactly like what OP shows: https://i.imgur.com/AFvhdNB.png https://i.imgur.com/AFvhdNB.png (Except the "it becomes smaller when pausing" part, of course) I'm not saying it's bad and IMO it's fine, just that I don't think it's really different from Apple music app.
- josefresco 6y ago
  It's full screen, edge-to-edge in iOS (iPhone 11). In landscape it's acutally 100+% of the screen (which isn't great) I also use in Chrome where 40ish% of the screen is album art.
  - fireattack 6y ago
    Oh, that makes sense. Sorry for assuming they're the same as Android's.

doomlaser 6y ago

Static album cover art is more nebulous in the streaming age. What's interesting is the different approaches users and musical groups have taken to accompanying video on platforms like YouTube. There is not yet a de facto standard to replace the static square image of yesteryear, but there are a lot of interesting one-offs.

vardaro 6y ago
Which is a shame. I can think of an handful of records that sound exactly like their cover art and I believe that detail helps tie the record together
rchaud 6y ago
Animated cover art is here: https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/10/apple-music-adding-animated-album-artwork-with-ios-14-3-and-macos-big-sur-11-1/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/10/apple-music-adding-animated-a... However, it still feels very limited. They're all looping cinegraphs, they don't 'do' anything. For an example of a genuinely imaginative liner notes experience, check out the floppy disk that came with Billy Idol's ambitious 1993 effort "Cyberpunk": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjl6As2lRGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjl6As2lRGU

gabagool 6y ago

Maybe this is my fault for not moving to Apple Music, but the iOS Music app, subjectively, is total crap ever since iOS 9. The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs/Artists/Albums/Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer). Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX.

yarcob 6y ago
It doesn't go away with Apple Music, they just shove their explore features in your face, and the experience for listening to your favorite artists still sucks.
- celeritascelery 6y ago
  And whenever you quit Apple Music, it will delete all your playlists, even if they only had music you owned and created before you signed up.
Jtsummers 6y ago
You can still add (under Library) Composer as one of the selection options, click Edit in the top right. However, my problem was (was it in iOS 9?) when they moved Downloaded from a permanently set toggle switch to a folder you selected. Which brought you to the exact same view as Library but with only the music on your device. And if you leave the app you may or may not end up in that same view when you return. It made more sense as a setting that you had to deliberately set or unset, not as a "view" of your content where the default was to use more bandwidth and play things you'd deliberately deleted.
rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
Soundjam MP was great stuff on my Twentieth Anniversary Mac back in the day. iTunes is nearly unusable.
tehwebguy 6y ago
> Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I'm bothered by a loss in UX. Nope, I just finished a 3 month trial and it never got any easier. There is no way the person in charge of this app actually uses it day to day (or maybe they've just never used Spotify?) My biggest grievances: - Wouldn't be ready to play what I was last listening to immediately, esp if data service was low (Spotify seems always ready to go, even if I haven't explicitly downloaded a song to cache) - Awful recommendations -- Kept playing songs from the first Tyler, the Creator album when I was listening to vapor/synthwave radio (I like that album but they do not go together!)

jordanpg 6y ago

Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn't care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube. What I do care about is a current "About" tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for/by the artist. Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the "vector" needs to shift elsewhere. Good example is the backgrounds created by Cryo Chamber for their YT postings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc

coldpie 6y ago
Yeah my first though on reading the article title was "neither do I." I'd find a little information about the album (date; what number album it is from that artist; collaborators) way more useful than the art.
mmglr 6y ago
> Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. Maybe cover art is less meaningful *to you*. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful. Today UX/UI teams are making decisions for everyone and not allowing anyone to deviate from those decisions. Less and less apps offer users a choice via a settings UI. To me the fix is simple allow users to customize their UI.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Maybe cover art is less meaningful to you. FTFY. To the author it is meaningful. The author admits they're in a niche: > The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about cover art. So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Like most people these days I listen to music for the music, not the physical media artwork.
  - mmglr 6y ago
    > So they're aware that really most people don't really care any more. Unless you are on the Apple Music team and have access to some study how would you know that?

mushufasa 6y ago

Eh, I see this more as a shift in consumer design patterns overall. At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books. Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music. Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.

amelius 6y ago
Meanwhile lots of folks are going back to vinyl.
- echelon 6y ago
  The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. You don't have to hate streaming to enjoy vinyl, and vice versa. I happen to enjoy both and treat them as different experiences. I'm fine if the expectations around digital change as long as it's still accessible.
  - crocsarecool 6y ago
    I do the same thing! I find that with vinyl I’m more likely to listen to the whole album. With streaming, I’ll hear a song I like, remember another song, hop around all over the place.
  - rory 6y ago
    This was (is?) the idea behind Paper & Plastick Records [0] in the MP3 heyday. The "paper" is a download code, and the "plastick" is a vinyl record along with it. Pretty fun concept IMO. [0] http://www.paperandplastick.com/ http://www.paperandplastick.com/
- barnaclejive 6y ago

allenu 6y ago

Sadly, I think it's just that the world has moved on from albums as "coveted" goods that you treasure to just being commodities. With music streaming services, each album isn't as precious as the old days where you'd actually purchase a CD, a cassette, or a vinyl record. There's just so much music out there now, and so readily available. IMHO, as a result, how albums are presented is now just an afterthought.

ewmiller 6y ago
Check out discogs.com. Most music listeners don't covet their physical media anymore, but there are still millions of people globally who buy and trade vinyl, and even CDs. Anecdotally, I have a friend who collects rare underground CDs from the mid-2000's because vinyl hadn't been revived yet and digital streaming wasn't big yet, so some bands who were only active during that time only ever put out CDs. And personally I have a few dozen vinyl albums that came out in the last 10 years. With the vinyl revival, I expect album art will still continue to be important to niche music collectors, and any artist who releases in full-album format (many artists just do singles now, so that won't apply to them I'm sure).
- allenu 6y ago
  Yeah, interestingly I've been buying vinyl from independent artists when I can, and usually they'll include codes to download the digital format. I finally bought a record player a few months ago and have been enjoying the experience of just focusing on playing one album at a time.

brandonmenc 6y ago

Worse imo, the artist listing using photos of the band or artist as the image instead of a cover of an album - which makes it useless for visual scanning.

woodruffw 6y ago

Spotify on the desktop is also guilty of this: the default cover art view is microscopic; clicking the "expand" button brings it up to a merely small view.

res0nat0r 6y ago
Agree. But I think the overall reason is obvious: customers don't care about album art either. If they did (and used their buying power to show this), Spotify / Apple would change their products.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I care about album art and am frustrated with both Apple and Spotify. Does anyone have suggestions where I should direct my buying power so I can listen to music and view high res album art?
  - res0nat0r 6y ago
    Buy vinyl on discogs.com, or vinyl from any of your other favorite online retailer.
    - yarcob 6y ago
      I buy Vinyl, but most new Vinyl releases suck. They just stuff a bunch of songs on 3 or 4 sides that end up half empty, so you need to flip the record all the time.
      - res0nat0r 6y ago
        Vinyl has always had this shorter time length. > A standard 12-inch 33 RPM vinyl record can have a playtime of roughly 22 minutes per side for a total of 44 minutes. A 7-inch 45 RPM record can fit approximately 5 minutes per side for a total of 10 minutes. Generally, any longer, the sound quality would start to deteriorate. https://peakvinyl.com/record-playtimes/ https://peakvinyl.com/record-playtimes/

nmeofthestate 6y ago

If you think this is bad you should see how terrible the photo app "Instagram" is for viewing photographs.

brianberns 6y ago

Another minor beef: Rounded corners for an album cover image don't make sense, either historically or aesthetically. Just give us the full image please, Apple.

dirtybird04 6y ago

At least it's static. Spotify keeps pushing music videos as cover art for singles and it's annoying as hell. If I wanted to see a video, I would've used other platforms.

yarcob 6y ago

Both Spotify and Apple Music make it really hard to see album art. It seems they just don't care about it. They show tiny thumbnails, and there's no way to make it bigger. But it's not like artists care either. 99% of artist websites just have low resolution pictures as well. I recently bought an LP, mainly for the album art, and when I unwrapped it at home I realised that they apparently sent 72 DPI files to the printer. I just don't get it. They make all this elaborate artwork, and then they only let you see thumbnails.

_jstreet 6y ago

What's the alternative option? Stretch and pixelate the album art so it's larger on the screen? Personally, I wouldn't use a music player to view album art.

glitchdout 6y ago
The alternative is doing what the iPod does.

GhostVII 6y ago

Wow that blog is awesome, mostly random short posts like this.

scop 6y ago

I was listening to James Hetfield on the Joe Rogan Experience a few months back and he highlighted an experienced I completely forgot existed: buying albums solely based on album art. I remember as a kid walking through the aisles of albums, floating around certain genres, and deciding on what to purchase purely because of an album cover. Band I had never heard of, well, look at that cover!

gagege 6y ago
I still do this on Spotify. Scroll through the new releases and if a cover looks interesting, I give it a listen. Having grown up in record stores, I love that I can listen to anything instantly. It's pretty insane actually.
rchaud 6y ago
I might do this for the $1 vinyl/CD rack, but never in general. CDs were crazy expensive. We're talking $17.99 in the year 2000 and maybe $9.99 for the cassette. I don't many kids that had money to drop on something based on the art alone. We needed money for magazines and concerts too y'know.
- scop 6y ago
  Good point. I didn't have that kind of money simply laying around, but I would sometimes save up and pay the $17.99. With that level of risk there was that much more reward, almost a form of gambling. It probably made my young brain give each song a lot more attention than I would have otherwise as I had to make sure I got my investment "back".
  - rchaud 6y ago
    That is true. When I bought an album, I listened to it front and back. Gave several chances to songs that didn't connect with me the first time. Even though that was 20 years ago, I still remember the mediocre songs better than I remember some songs from the recent past that I actually liked.
- asdff 6y ago

vardaro 6y ago

If you want to appreciate the album art then purchase the LP. A tiny JPEG on AM or Spotify UI is never going to cut it for anybody who is interested in inspecting the cover art. These tools are designed for background listening

msackmann 6y ago

That‘s why I use the sleevenote app, which defaults to showing only the cover as large as possible. They even plan to build a square-screen music player :-D

Animats 6y ago

Albums are so last-cen. In the Apple ecosystem, the unit of sale is the song.

thinnerlizzy 6y ago

I liked iTunes back in the Steve Jobs days when, if album art wasn’t available, in its place it would display the album info on the diagonal against a white background, as if it were an old bootleg with stamped info on a white record sleeve. As a collector/listener of bootlegs I appreciated that little bit of skeuomorphism.

fireattack 6y ago

My pet peeve about album cover art is digital music distributors padding non-square covers with white margins. They look like shit in almost all the UIs that don't have a white background.

robomartin 6y ago

Have they implement the simple idea of respecting the integrity of an album? I have to admit not having messed with music on iPhone for many years because of this. Did it improve? What I mean is: I want to listen to the Brandenburg Concerto or The Wall from start to finish and in order. Not possible for so long I gave up. The other aspect of this was wanting to import a sizable music library from Windows Media consisting of dozens of CD’s I own. A total mess, including the aforementioned problem.

rchaud 6y ago
Back in the day, a big differentiator for non-iPod MP3 players was whether they had gapless playback. As a marketing tactic, it worked about as well as Flash compatibility did for early Android devices.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I sympathize in spirit, even if I never used iTunes back in the day, because I refused in principle to pay for digital goods and preferred to buy the CDs and rip them myself. Amazon AutoRip being the sole exception, because that seems to just be a convenience feature for something I was going to do anyway. Compared to the "all-streaming" future, however, sure, I'll take iTunes over that any day.

egypturnash 6y ago

I really hate how little space is used for album art on iOS iTunes, it's even more pathetic if you try to plug an iPad into your stereo and imagine that it would have a nice big image of the album art filling that gorgeous display like it used to do, hahahaha NOPE, you get a crappy little popup that's the same size as the goddamn iPhone player, no cover art you can recognize when you look up from a chair across the room for you! I also hate that despite there being a "lyrics" tag lurking in every track it is never pre-filled when I buy music off of Apple's store, I always have to go visit dodgy lyrics sites and cut and paste. Admittedly this is more a problem with the entire setup for distributing music digitally, I would bet money that even if a musician does stick lyrics into their uploads, it will get stripped out somewhere along the way when it's transcoded into whatever format you're actually buying.

omgJustTest 6y ago

I don't know if there is a term for this already, but [1] really shifted my mindset. Basically if you own the platform / store there is a strong incentive to reduce the ability of products to keep their brand-authority. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-copyright.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...

shadeslayer_ 6y ago

Another takeaway from this post is the album, as a unit of music, falling out of vogue. The album name doesn't show up anywhere on the Spotify/Apple Music UI - you have to go deep into the artist pages (?) to find it. Streaming is the main mode of consuming music for most people, and streaming platforms only care about the number of plays. It is sort of sad, because some of the best pieces of music over the last century have been albums where the songs are tied together in some sort of progression - these are often called concept albums. The Wall, Ziggy Stardust, American Idiot are a few examples that come to mind. Soon there might come a day when nobody actually takes the time to listen to an album from start to finish.

giantrobot 6y ago
> Soon there might come a day when nobody actually takes the time to listen to an album from start to finish. The "album" in general has long been an industry contrivance. Most musical acts would be much better served if singles and EPs were the most asked of them in terms of recordings. Because they're trying to fill "albums" (~44 min LPs or ~60 min CDs) there's tons of filler recorded all the time. Some is literal filler pulled from a fakebook and recorded just to put another track on an album. Even with bands I love I can rarely make it through entire albums without skipping at least half the songs. I've been making playlists for decades (mix tapes, then CD-Rs, then iPod playlists). I'd much rather an artist release five good songs as an EP and sell it to me for five bucks. I'll bundle all the EPs together as an "album" if I want.
- daemin 6y ago
  Well there is a difference in artists that produce a few good songs and then fill the rest of the album with other tracks, and artists that make an entire album be a journey of audio. There's also a lot of albums which are shorter than the full CD size, and a lot which max out the CD length. I think like all art having limitations actually enhances creativity, since it makes the artist cut things out and decide what is truly important. So realistically it can vary on the artist and they should probably customise their delivery based on a particular format. Singles/streaming for individual tracks, vinyl for something slightly longer, CDs for longer, and then maybe USB stick holding a really long flac file for those epic progressive sessions.

ewmiller 6y ago

It's funny that everyone is saying physical media is dying - that might be true for the majority of the population, but for niche music collectors vinyl is making a big comeback. I personally have a growing collection of a few dozen vinyl albums, and I'm 26, so I didn't exactly grow up with that format. I know of at least one artist who did a simplified album cover for their streaming content, but for the physical version of the album you open up the cover and see the full work of art that was left out of the digital version (hard to explain, but you get the idea). I think that's a really cool way to bridge the physical-digital gap and reward people who like collecting albums as a form of physical art.

rchaud 6y ago
Physical media is dying. More people getting into vinyl doesn't change the tectonic shift towards digital and streaming that's killed off record stores and vinyl production facilities. Based on the Kickstarters I've seen, it's not easy or cheap for bands to produce a run of vinyl records. And even then, the finished product is expensive to purchase and ship. More so than a T-shirt or a concert ticket, which are higher-margin products by far.
- asdff 6y ago
  People still buy records even when they cost so much. There's always a decent small market for this stuff that isn't going away, because the equipment lasts forever. The record store in my neighborhood just moved into a larger space.

klelatti 6y ago

Two more gripes: - Why does the album art on the lock screen have to be so small I can barely make out what is playing? - Why can't we have what was on the back of the album too? (And the gatefold for those slightly over indulgent double albums). I would switch in a heartbeat to a service that gave us the latter!

glitchdout 6y ago
The lock screen has been annoying me forever and I still forgot to write about it. I've updated the post to mention this. You are absolutely right! As for the back of the album, I agree as well! But I would consider that an extra. Not to mention that I would want to update my album collection to include that back cover, and finding a good front cover is already hard enough
- klelatti 6y ago
  Thanks and for writing about this in the first place. It actually made be feel much better that I'm not alone in being frustrated about cover art!

dinero_rojo 6y ago

I went into the article expecting someone else to eloquently echo my own thoughts and issues with Apple fucking with my album art, but this is so tame compared to what I’m experiencing. Basically, anyone who’s ever had a greatest hits compilation seems to get their “actual” studio album art replaced with the art of that compilation album at random. For example, off the top of my head, when I’m in the album section for Low, “Heroes”, or Lodger (three David Bowie albums with iconic cover art and even better music), the only image on the page is for a different, shitty compilation album that I’ve never owned, listened to, or have any interest in whatsoever. But things somehow get worse as you’re listening to the album. Each song gets a different cover, seemingly at random. In fact, on “Heroes” alone, an album originally with ten songs (my reissued version has two extra), I have FIVE (5!) different album covers, (one of which is the original, attached to only the fifth, tenth, and bonus songs). I’m so baffled by this decision and literally cannot conceive of anyone, sane or otherwise, asking for this or even thinking that it’s anything other than the worst possible way to handle album art.

scop 6y ago
THIS. If anybody at Apple Music is reading this, please prioritize the song from the actual album in search results. It kills me to be bumped into Greatest Hits or compilations so often.
- creaturemachine 6y ago
  Some things never change. I fought this same fight back in the iTunes days.

coldtea 6y ago

>Apple doesn't care about Album Cover Art Apple? Has anybody (maybe except cover designers) cared about Album Cover Art ever since the transition to CD? And it went downhill with Napster etc. downloads (zero cover art 99% of the time), and later with official stores and streaming (small cover art). Heck, with video games, good TV series, Netflix, internet, social media, youtube, mobile versions of the above, and so on, available the last decade or so, I think people (including the younger demographic) care less about music than ever since the time of Elvis. It's just not as big as a cultural deal anymore as the "escape" it represented for some kind up to the 80s-90s, now it's just one more thing in a whole range of available diversions...

cosmotic 6y ago

"Why isn’t it touching the edges of the screen?" Why should it? One of the reasons it shouldn't touch is because it artificially creates a full-bleed line that separates the content and conveys that they are disconnected when they aren't. "Why can’t I read the album name from the cover?" It can't be read because that's apparently what the artist intended. Many album covers don't even have the album title printed on it. "why can’t I see that The Who took a piss on the monolith?" You can't read everything even on 1:1 replication of the album; but your phone is unconditionally smaller than an actual album cover. "So much creativity, imagination and artistry thrown in the bin for no good reason." It's not throwing anything away; it's making up for numerous design constraints.

AlexandrB 6y ago
A lot of the talk around getting rid of skeuomorphism was about putting the content front and centre. This seems like the opposite of that. The content is reduced to a little box and the miles of padding that seems "necessary" for a modern UI is the real focus.
- cosmotic 6y ago
  Skeuomorphism was a largely misguided but not altogether bad design direction. Putting content front and center is a separate design direction that has its own tradeoffs. Massive margins everywhere is another design direction that I think is almost entirely misguided. I'm perfectly happy with the larger of the inset album art screenshots, but the smallest I agree is much too small.

w0mbat 6y ago

Apple legally bought Cover Flow from the inventors, but was sued by patent troll Mirror Worlds LLC. Mirror Worlds was awarded $625.5 million in damages, but Apple appealed and won. Apple then got their own design patent on Cover Flow, but doesn't seem to use it any more.

rchaud 6y ago
Didn't even know there was a patent for it. Cover Flow based UI has been possible via Swiper JS for years. https://codepen.io/Pysilla/pen/qBdOVGQ https://codepen.io/Pysilla/pen/qBdOVGQ

Topgamer7 6y ago

My father has been going bonkers about trying to just set his own album art in itunes about the library he maintains of cd rips. The dialog for setting the cover art just doesn't work. You can choose the image, it doesn't report any errors or anything went wrong, but it never sets the album image. The only thing I managed to get to work was if you can find the album in the itunes store, and match all the metadata, you can get the automatic metadata logic to set it properly for you. But he has some esoteric versions of albums, and he wants to use those album covers that itunes doesn't have in their db.

rchaud 6y ago
This is the biggest reason why I never owned an iPod long-term. Everything had to be done via iTunes. I owned players from Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony and Creative, and they were all dead simple. Just drag the folders on to the player icon. If the folder contains an image, that's the album art. I owned a ton of unofficial B-sides compilations and live bootlegs, so this was the only way.
danlugo92 6y ago
Its been years but have you tried clicking on the album art, after selecring it? It should show up inside thst little window but then you gotta click on it then click ok/save/whateves
- Topgamer7 6y ago
  I have not, but I will give it a look, thanks!
  - danlugo92 6y ago
    How did it go?
    - Topgamer7 5y ago
      No dice. It does select the image. But after you click on ok nothing happens. So to be clear, we get past the point of selecting the image. After clicking ok to set the selected image to the album, it just does nothing.

twobitshifter 6y ago

I agree that cover art should be shown as large as possible for older works. I remember looking at my Lateralus CD cover art over and over again. It’s sleeve and a series of holograms and transparent pages that really push the limits of what you can do with 2D. In a static image in Apple Music, you won’t ever get the same feeling even if the image was 3 times larger. That said, someone developing art for music no longer has to stick to sheets and 2D, Spotify or Apple Music can provide visualizations and info with the music that can do far more than the album art can. Tool was dealing within the confines of a jewel cd case, but that’s no longer a constraint.

pram 6y ago
Yes the little book that came with Lateralus was amazing. It's one of the few rare instances where the CD release is far superior to any subsequent vinyl releases. The Lateralus picture vinyl is neat, but it doesn't present the series of images the way it was intended to be seen.

ungzd 6y ago

At least they don't ban nudity in album cover art (it's very common in cover art). Including in third-party apps like Spotify.

nbzso 6y ago

Design at Apple is lost. But there is no better alternative. Widows is a joke of UI/UX. I blame flat design and fear of skeumorphism trends. Cover art is “emotional” element and it must be visible and beautiful, the idea that you don’t need this is stupid. Actually you need a modern implementation, but for what it would be, I have ideas and exchange them for money, not for likes or karma. :)

Black101 6y ago

Comcast doesn't care about customer name, address, or phone number... they only look at your IP address... Because the last 2 times I asked for credits, they sent it to the wrong account even if I gave them the correct name, address and phone number... once they even sent a technician to the wrong address because I was using their connection when I asked for support.

showdead 6y ago

Oh, the irony. https://iili.io/qkNFd7.png https://iili.io/qkNFd7.png

nreilly 6y ago

I suspect they wouldn't go to the effort in supporting animated cover art[0] if they didn't care. [0] https://music.apple.com/us/album/gigaton/1495371272 https://music.apple.com/us/album/gigaton/1495371272

austinkhale 6y ago
Is there a name for this style of animation? Where it’s essentially a static image but with one part animated?
- jimmux 6y ago
  There's no animation in that link for me, but it sounds like you're describing a cinemagraph.
- xsmasher 6y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs/
vestrigi 6y ago
They‘re apparently not caring a whole lot. If you play that a song from that album it will show the static cover art. Also it seems to me like the bigger ‘full screen’ like artworks are reserved to major labels or at least come at a premium.

tomovo 6y ago

I just recenly added cover art to the main window of my Tiny Player for Mac application. It was one of the most requested features. Seems like people like looking at covers while listening. While it is not edge to edge in my case, I’m considering it. https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/ https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/

globular-toast 6y ago

Buy the LP if you care about album art.

cpcallen 6y ago

This post complains about the cover art being too small on iOS, but my complaint is that on macOS iTunes by-album view ditched the art size slider a few years ago, and picked a fixed size that is so big that you can only see about a dozen albums at a time on a 13" laptop screen. This change was so obnoxious I actually looked in to ditching iTunes entirely, but there just wasn't a decent alternative that made editing metadata as easy and would sync with my iPod. Speaking of which...

m463 6y ago

Tesla doesn't either. Tesla can read your music from USB flash drives. This is wonderful, because they have a premium audio system (used to cost $2500) and you could play high-quality music. You could load a drive with FLAC or Apple Lossless music and play it back without MP3 lossiness and artifacts. Yet album art? they do not care. Here's a thread on how the USB player is a buggy unsupported mess. It recently lost the ability to display album art, but there are plenty of other problems (like no playlist support or any number of other problems) https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bug-list.77775/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu... This thread has > 2000 posts going back 5 years and it is updated almost daily.

grecht 6y ago
Can you hear the difference between 320 kbit/s mp3 and lossless formats?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Even if I could I genuinely don't care.
- tpetry 6y ago
  And more specific: with car audio and on a busy road
- xmodem 6y ago
  Nope, but storage is so cheap who cares? might as well keep the lossless
- meshenna 6y ago
  I can't even hear the difference between 128 and 320 :|
  - 1_player 6y ago
    I read somewhere that younger people (I guess Millenials that grew up with Napster) might prefer 128kbps to lossless in blind audio tests because it sound better to them — artifacts and all — as it's what they are used to. Anyone has the source for this?

mastrsushi 6y ago

What a neurotic thing to complain about. "Oh no, my pretty pictures are slightly smaller. Apple doesn't care!".

nodefortytwo 6y ago

In my car when spotify is playing through carplay I get a nice album art on my screen and between my dials, it also uses the colour as a blurred background effect, quite nice and makes me appreciate the art even if i'm (hopefully) not directly looking at it.

IceDane 6y ago

No, neither do I and neither do most people. The music is what matters. If you want to look at the album art, nothing is preventing you from simply finding the picture and staring at it. What a stupid, meaningless thing to rant about and what a stupid meaningless thing to upvote on HN.

tomovo 6y ago
Like going to a concert is meaningless because it's just a bit louder and all you do is look at the musicians? Damn that's cold.
vletal 6y ago
Such a close minded harsh thing to say.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Is this because the images that they obtained 10-20 years ago are much lower resolution and look pixelated if expanded to the resolution of modern retina screens? I've just looked at Baba O'Reiley on Apple music on my iphone plus 8 and the artwork is as wide as the text/controls.

0df8dkdf 6y ago

This is what happens when a charismatic leader of a tech company dies (2012). Who ever is running the company doesn't have the essence of what created iPod. Just mass consumerism now.

reportgunner 6y ago

You are funding this by continuing to buy apple products.

Tsiklon 6y ago

As a complete aside, I have a fondness for that older layout, back when I used to dip my toe in the jailbreak scene I used a tweak which sampled the album art and changed the layout colours to match the album cover - I think it was called “colourflow” I always wondered why Apple didn’t integrate something similar into the player Here’s a selection of album covers from my screenshots at the time (I used a different font as my system font for several of them): https://imgur.com/a/6rZ3JSY https://imgur.com/a/6rZ3JSY

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

I remember everyone cheering when Apple said they were replacing iTunes with Music.app on OSX. Upgraded recently and I'm shocked at the regression, it actually feels so slow compared to iTunes and having to go into an album page and back to album menu rather than just rolling the album open in-situ like on iTunes is insufferable. Things for music library users are just being made worse and worse to make it more consistent with how Apple Music works. No care if it's better for the user or not.

deorder 6y ago

Apple automatically started using one of our band's album covers as the artist image. When I submitted an new artist logo they turned it down because artist / band logos are not allowed. They only allow faces. The thing is, the band can have anyone as an artist, so we decided to keep the ugly album cover that Apple automatically used as the artist image (which is not even according to their guidelines btw.)

tanseydavid 6y ago

I care deeply about cover art and sneer at any philistine who does not also care deeply about cover art. "For the love of money is the root of all evil"

marstall 6y ago

PSA: I made an alternative Apple Music client that has huuuuge album art - flush to the edges regardless of screen size https://shelf.fm https://shelf.fm

robotresearcher 6y ago

Cover art is a non-trivial part of the album experience. Consider 'Sgt. Pepper', 'Revolver', 'Unknown Pleasures', 'Rage Against the Machine', or 'Nevermind' without thinking of the cover image.