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ITunes 11 and Colors
- windsurfer 14y agoAs someone without iTunes, what does iTunes do now? There are no screenshots/videos in this article.
- jrnkntl 14y agoHere is a screenshot utilizing the colors of the album art: http://d.pr/i/st40 http://d.pr/i/st40 (Please don't judge my taste of music ;) As you can see it also removes the border from the album art to blend it with the color.
- duopixel 14y agoThe album view displays a color scheme based on the album artwork. The results vary from good to great, I haven't encountered any poor examples of it's application. You can see an example here: http://daringfireball.net/misc/2012/12/itunes-11-expanded-view-frank.jpg http://daringfireball.net/misc/2012/12/itunes-11-expanded-vi... The text, background and highlight colors are based on on the album artwork.
- evoxed 14y agoI see plenty of poor ones, but you could attribute at least half of those cases to all the 70s and 80s prog/psych/metal I've got now.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoIt's a music manager you're forced to use on Apple hardware. It's awful for everything except automating what music goes on the device for those who don't care about what they listen to.
- nicholassmith 14y agoThat's not quite what the poster is asking for.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoThe poster said: As someone without iTunes, what does iTunes do now?
- eridius 14y agoContext is very important in understanding human speech.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoIt's also a store front for buying mp3s.
- addlepate 14y agoIt is hilarious to me that I got hellbanned and this person probably won't. Jeez.
- untog 14y agoSomething similar to this was done at my old job, about four years ago. It took images that were not square and padding out the shorter dimension with an averaged colour from the edge. It looks like so: http://i.imgur.com/6WZCQ.png http://i.imgur.com/6WZCQ.png Sometimes it works well, other times it really doesn't. But it's an interesting idea- and certainly not a new one (though Apple has certainly done it better)
- industrialwaste 14y agoWhat is this? A png for ants? ;)
- untog 14y agoHah, yes, it's a bad example. I couldn't remember how to grab a larger size, but now I remember. Here's a 150px example: http://i.imgur.com/fjehG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/fjehG.jpg
- industrialwaste 14y agoahh, much better! Thanks! I'm assuming the top section was the generated content on it, correct?
- untog 14y agoAnd the bottom. That you didn't notice is a testament to how well it works... sometimes :)
- superted 14y agoGood job "emulating" the iTunes algorithm. Request to op: It would have been good to have some sample code inline in the article that illustrated the algorithm. I know there's an Xcode project attached, but reading this on an iPad has its limitations.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- skeletonjelly 14y agoSome pictures would have helped too, considering not everyone has iTunes, and it's an article about a visual feature. OP could have tried out the new Gist to display code too Edit: I meant pictures of the existing Apple implementation to see what they were on about. I see the pictures of their algorithm but it makes no sense to talk about the comparison when there's nothing to compare to
- robflynn 14y agoI do love that feature. I developed something like this a couple years ago for a back office part of a project: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4p5m4719ehvpohc/GUEHcYecYv https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4p5m4719ehvpohc/GUEHcYecYv I don't have a good example of the project any longer, but I took a few snapshots during the development process. My test page allowed you to upload a logo and have the page dynamically change to match the new logo. The link above is a gallery of a few of my tests. Sometimes it did a pretty good job. Other times the results were a little more 'meh.' The original code was pretty hacked together in PHP and a little client side JS, though I've been considering resurrecting it as a ruby gem. There was a bug in the code in one of these examples. The 5th image or so is of a tornado with a bright orange background. The code failed to select the orange as an interesting color to use. The result still looks fine but I would have liked for it to have sampled that bit as well. It's been long enough that I can't recall what the exact problem was.
- thomaspark 14y agoVery cool. Here's my attempt at it, which uses the JS library Color Thief: http://thomaspark.me/project/expandingalbums/ http://thomaspark.me/project/expandingalbums/
- robflynn 14y agoVery nice! That color thief library would have made my work a lot easier. Here's the process I did without pasting my embarrassingly hacky code: * Accepted image from user * Quantized the image down to 6 main colors (I forget how I arrived at this figure.) * Slapped it on a canvas * Generated a color histogram * Converted RGB to HSB * Did a border check of the image to determine the background color. Extended the border based on most common background color if needed. * Looked at the saturation of the colors to determine what might be interesting to use. Picked a primary and secondary color from that. * From there I converted each of the color to YIQ to determine contrast levels to determine if I needed lighter or darker colors for the text. * Generated some "accent" colors by modifying lightness levels of some of the primary and secondary colors. From there I pretty much had the things I needed to make something theme-like. Thanks for posting this. I enjoyed reading over the code. You also reminded me that I need to ditch my crappy JS tempting library that I wrote and switch to moustache.
- bpopov 14y agoThis reminds of the work @matasar and @attaboy did back in 2007 on Dabble DB: http://blog.dabbledb.com/2007/04/white--or-green.html http://blog.dabbledb.com/2007/04/white--or-green.html
- cormullion 14y agoSee also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13637892/how-does-the-algorithm-to-color-the-song-list-in-itunes-11-work http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13637892/how-does-the-alg...
- gaidica 14y agoWe have been using this technique for a while to go from logo-to-brand, I have a demo and API for it: http://landr.co/brandr/ http://landr.co/brandr/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- skeletonjelly 14y agoThat's really cool! Has this been featured on HN before?
- gaidica 14y agoNope!
- skeletonjelly 14y agoThis would be a timely submission! :)
- jrajav 14y agoIsn't something like this done for the Windows >=7 taskbar icons too? Only for a single color, though.
- estel 14y agoSimilarly Windows 8 can change the desktop theme's colour to match the wallpaper.
- joeguilmette 14y agoUntil just recently I was an iTunes power user. I have a 15 year old 80gb collection of pirated music - all full albums, all with pristine metadata and personalized genres. I do not have cover art tho, but I don't really care - until now. iTunes 11 makes a big deal about cover art - their UI is nearly exclusively dependent on it. I don't like thumbnails. When I look at my music, I want a big sortable list. I don't want a bunch of random (alphabetized) tiles that don't tell me much. Also - electronic music of today is largely post-album. It doesn't make sense to organize a bunch of remixes by different DJ by album cover. The previous version of iTunes had a hybrid view that had a sorted list with a small thumbnail to the left. It was useful because the thumbnails would scroll nicely with the text. But no longer as far as I can tell. The whole idea of curating my own collection, through either piracy or purchasing, seems outmoded to me. It's expensive even when it's free. Pirating music, at least at scale, is time consuming. iTunes is ridiculously expensive. My music collection would cost me $20k if I bought it and it feels woefully inadequate when I try find something to listen to. I just recently backed up my music collection and deleted it from my HD. I've signed up for Spotify Premium and am so far pleased. $10 is very fair (a bit high, but fair). The quality is consistent, I can save songs and playlists to my devices (feels like buying) and create radio stations that are functionally superior to Pandora (skipping, etc) but algorithmically inferior (try getting it to play Louis Armstrong style music and see how long it takes to play modern music, for me it's two tracks regardless of downvotes). Music discovery is just as important as curation, and Spotify scratches both itches. The iOS apps are buggy but so far it's working. I'm happy to leave iTunes behind. That said, I really loved SmartPlaylists. SmartPlaylists + Accurate Genres + Ratings = Powerful, Granular Track Syncing. It's just too time consuming, and now hard to manage with new emphasis on cover art.
- ry0ohki 14y agoI love that $10 for monthly access to basically every album ever on demand is "a bit high". I remember dropping $16 a pop on CDs/Tapes at Tower Records back in the day, probably bought at least two a month... In terms of your issue with iTunes cover art, didn't they announce some thing where you pay a flat fee and is basically matches all of your illegal music with legal one when iCloud was introduced (I never tried it just remember the keynote vaguely)
- gruseom 14y agoWhat's a good music player for OS X? I just want something simple that plays mp3s etc. and helps me manage my collection. Even before this redesign, iTunes was too bossy for me to like it. Is there something like Winamp when it was good?
- ericdykstra 14y agoCheck out Songbird at http://getsongbird.com/ http://getsongbird.com/ I prefer foobar2000 on Windows for a pure, unadulterated, customizable music player, but Songbird is the best player I've found on OS X. It is fast, plays music, and has a plugin for last.fm, which is everything I require.
- veridies 14y agoI've had the opposite experience; while with a fairly small library Songbird is fine, with mine (~700GB, lossless) it's incredibly slow and prone to crashing. Last time I tried it was about six months ago with no improvement.
- jamie_ca 14y agoIf you manage your own MP3 directory structure, and like to just drag and drop onto a player to queue stuff up, try http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/ http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/ I don't think it has a _lot_ of playlist support, but if you already have the m3u files it'll load them just fine.
- beshrkayali 14y agoIt's a pretty cool new feature. Something similar could be done in a browser with http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/ http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/.
- aaronbrethorst 14y agoI took the liberty of extracting the interesting bits of this into a reusable class, and tossed it up on GitHub: https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/ColorArt https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/ColorArt If I have the time this afternoon, I'll port it over to iOS, too. Or, if someone feels inclined to do so, I welcome pull requests :) Edit: and I transferred the repo over to Panic. I'm maintaining a fork so the link above doesn't go dead.
- mcgwiz 14y agoAs noted by jrajav, since Vista, the Windows taskbar features a single-color version of this, inferred from application icon. Additionally, the New Tab page in Chrome has exhibited this (inferred from favicon) for as long as I can remember.
- adamzegelin 14y agoI always enjoy reading Panic's blog. They always have something interesting to say.
- batiudrami 14y agoSince Windows 7, hovering over an open application in the taskbar has done a similar thing. I sometimes wonder how it almost always manages to pick the dominant colour, even if it isn't necessarily the most common one.
- tambourine_man 14y agoAnyone noticed the lag between typing and results being displayed? It's infuriating, instant search results used to be the hallmark of iTunes.
- msutherl 14y agoStefan Sagmeister's logo/branding for Casa da Música takes this idea in reverse – the logo colors are determined by the surrounding imagery: http://www.sagmeister.com/work/featured#/node/192 http://www.sagmeister.com/work/featured#/node/192