Album Art Browser/Similar to New iTunes (1 Viewer)

[mPod]

Yup, see here: http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/

 

[shawnwc]

Coverflow

You know.. I've been rolling through the albums on iTunes for fun. This is the coolest thing. Digital music has has always had that "virtual" sense, compared to actually holding a CD. This makes it really seem like you're moving through a real collection (and it's visually appealing and fun).

I've been using MP for a short while, but I don't really ever play music with MP, as it's almost a waste of having the TV on. This one single feature would have me playing music through MP all the time.


I can't imagine it's too much coding outside of the opengl or whatever.. There's never more than 10 albums on the screens, and each moves in a specific way left and right - seems like a static path of movement in either direction. A fast/indexed database with the album covers to keep up the speed of rolling through them.

There doesn't seem to be ANYONE else with a clone for this... This could explode you guys out there in the music jukebox area.

 

[zag2me]

I spent a few hours looking at this today, it seems there are very little tutorials on the net on how to draw 3d objects and map textures to them with direct x and c#. Lots for openGL and c++ examples though.

As you say it is actually a very simple programming exercise, all it needs is a basic animation for the cover move, then mapping of the cover to the box. Maybe some light shading and anti aliasing would be cool too

some msdn tutorials here

texturing a cube
http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/zman/zmantextures/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/d...x9_m/directx/direct3d/tutorials/tutorials.asp

 

[shawnwc]

Sorry for bumping...

I played with the new iTunes all weekend, showed all my friends. I only use iTunes to move music to my ipod - but this Coverflow has been keeping my attention. It may be the biggest PC-jukebox advancement since ID3 tags.

This Coverflow feature makes it feel like a real jukebox... No more lists of your music. No small coverart to make you feel like you're scrolling through your collection as a flat 2D list. It really looks like your moving through your collection.

It's fun to make the cases slide across the screen. It looks vivid and sharp - and moves so smoothly. IT LOOKS LIKE A CD COLLECTION.

This feature alone could catapult MP to the masses... Make it impossible for MS MediaCenter to ever catch up (or recapture users). I know for a fact a feature like this would push a handful of my friends to go out and buy a PC for MP, and use it seriously.

There seemed to be a clone out there, but it's since disappeared. A week ago this was a 3rd party add-on.

 

[shawnwc]

http://labs.beffa.org/coverplay/

http://labs.beffa.org/coverplay/

This is a CoverFlow clone... Maybe he/she could be talked into building it into MP??

 

[The_Stig]

Maybe I am missing something but I don't think this is very useful. It looks really nice, but what is the advantage of it? I mean searching my MusicDB via Covers??? It as if I want to find my car on a big parking lot by only looking at the antenna of all cars...

 

[jawbroken]

Haha. I totally agree. But it sure does look pretty...

 

[shawnwc]

I've ripped all my CDs to MP3. I play them from my 60Gb iPod into both my iPod Dock via Receiver & iPod Boombox -- when of course I'm not just wearing my iPod.

I love MP, but frankly I've only been using it for playing video files & using it as a PVR. I have no real use for file browsing my MP3 collection on my 50" television.

If MP had a coverflow-ish interface, I'd gladly play my music through MP... It looks absolutely incredible, and it's tons more - dare I say fun - to move through the albums in a jukebox-like interface.

Everyone in my office has an ipod... Everyone (including the non-technical people), love the recent update. I think such a feature could increase MP's user base, and possibly rocket ahead of every other jukebox software title out there.

And if you've tested out the recent iTunes update, you'd know it's not like looking for a car in a parking lot... There are several sorting/grouping options that still make it super simple to navigate through - all while making it look like you're really zipping through a pile of physcal CDs.

And it would certainly look a lot cooler shuffling through CD covers (that look like CDs) on my TV during a party, than playing those microsoft "effects" in the corner.

 

[_man_]

I played a bit with the new iTunes and Coverflow today and I do agree with Shawnwc : I love it and I think this would make MP more popular, especially vs MCE.