Linkmeister

CD thoughts

Dear CD/DVD jewel case manufacturers:

Get your Quality Control working better. I'll bet of the 108 CDs I have at least 10 have cracks in the covers. Worse, several have broken "ears," the extensions with the hinge pins that are supposed to hook to the spine of the case.

When buying used CDs I expect problems of this nature. When buying brand-new ones at full price, I don't.

This guy has the right idea: a Digital Jewel Box.

So how about making a Digital Jewel Box? Here’s how it would work: The DJB sits next to your stereo or computer in its charging dock. Similar to a digital picture frame, it syncs wirelessly to your home network via WiFi, syncing itself with iTunes or whatever digital player you use. When a new song comes on, the DJB’s screen shows the album cover art for that song.

At any time, you can take the DJB out of its dock, sit on the couch with it, and use the controls on its side to flip through the rest of the liner notes, including track listings, lyrics, song credits, acknowledgments, and whatever else is included in the paper version. The pleasure of flipping through liner notes doesn’t need to go away just because CDs do.

I like liner notes and cover art. Downloading digital music doesn't offer those things; the DJB does.

While on the subject, if you're looking for cover art for your iTunes (seems like the older the album the less likely the cover will be there, and that doesn't even cover the artists whose music isn't sold through Apple [ahem, The Beatles]), try AlbumArt. Select which country the album was released in at the bottom of the page or you may get unexpected results.

Once you've got the artwork and you have pasted it into your songs, will it stay there? Nope. It lives in a separate folder. If you want the appropriate code to be associated with each song, you have to embed it (apparently; don't swear by what I'm saying here). To do that, iCoverArt is a script which I've seen recommended. I haven't tried it yet (now that I have a backup of the entire libray, maybe I will). If anyone has a teeny-tiny library and wants to give it a shot, I'd be delighted to learn whether it works correctly. Testing it would, I think, involve encoding the art to your library on your hard drive and then synching to your iPod (which I can't do, since I have no iPod). If the art appears on the iPod then the encoding worked, or so I'm surmising.

Posted by Linkmeister at January 4, 2009 03:16 PM | TrackBack