Flowed into iTunes

Congrats to the kids who designed the application Coverflow (which I covered previously here) for designing something so elegant, Apple bought it. It is now in the vastly improved iTunes 7.

Besides gapless playback and multiple libraries, the best part my late night testing showed is that they maintained CoverFlows method of storing album covers as seperate files once per album, rather than embedding the graphics in every song file, which bloats my large library even more.

Now if only I could find a way to force it to use my previously downloaded album covers that I snagged with the original CoverFlow beta as well as those farmed by Synergy (which grabs from Amazon and others), as especially older Aussie bands and miscellaneous electronica mixes have been farmed by hand and won;t likely be snagged from the iTunes store. Haven't tried adding album covers to iTunes 7 yet, but don't expect it to be as intuitive as CoverFlow was (right click to paste the clipboard directly).

Looking forward to iTV also, as that is a much smoother TV viewing method than my current downlaod to 5-gen iPod, cable iPod to tele. And as CoverFlow shows, Apple are more than capable of exceeding Tivos renowned market-leading user-interface if they decide to also add TV recording capabilities. That will be an interesting battle.

And as for the renewed DRM iTunes 7 delivered, patching a recent application that strips it, well, that didn't last long did it.