[Satchmo]

Had a chance to play around with CoverFlow on one of the new iPods yesterday. While it's cool, I don't see why Jobs keeps on touting how great a feature this is (other than to sell more iPods).

There's a whole generation who has grown up not ever buying a CD and certainly not any vinyl LP's. And it's from this soon to be outdated medium that album art resonates with the listener. Today, much of the music is all downloaded. The connection to any art or liner notes is pretty limited. You may see it at the iTunes store but that's about it.

And when you play it back on your iPod, it's not as if you remember what the album art was...do you? I don't know, maybe it's just me being nostalgic with album art.

[ghoti]

It wold be more accurate to say "if you don't buy albums", but even that is debatable. I do know my cover pics, and I recognize them in CoverFlow. I also like the way I can browse through my music and realize how much stuff there is this way.

Of course, if you only buy single songs, this is different. But I have to say I like the idea of the album, and I will keep buying albums rather than single songs unless I really hate the rest of the album (which happens, but rarely). I've discovered lots of great songs on albums I only bought for one or two songs originally.

[macuser256]

I know it's frustrating to me because all the music on my computer is old and from a long time ago and has no album art. It doesn't even find any on itunes to fill in like it's supposed to so if i go into coverflow literally 5/6ths of my collection is just that blank grey square so coverflow is incredibly lame for me

[ghoti]

You can use Clutter to find cover art on Amazon and other websites. That also copies it over into iTunes. The images are sometimes of rather low quality, but still better than nothing.

[psmith2.0]

I'll go to Amazon or even Google image search to find smallish, nice-looking album cover art for things I'm missing. I'll drag it to the desktop, and then to the cover art window in iTunes, where it seems to import/attach itself to the selected file(s). I've done this for a while and have gotten so much of my music (the stuff I've not purchased off iTunes) to finally have some cover art that shows up in Cover Flow.

I never use Cover Flow on my Mac (I just use that standard list view). But on my iPhone, it's neat and fun to "flick your way" through your library, like you would at a jukebox where the panels flip/slide over to reveal more selections.

[BuonRotto]

iTunes downloads any album art it can for any music, whether you purchaed it or not. But yes, it's really better if youvhave a complete album download. It's not too interesting if you have one or two songs from an album. Actually, I think it will be much more useful for perusing documents when you want to see their conents better (well, if they have graphics at least).

[psmith2.0]

Yeah, I let iTunes try to get whatever it can on the stuff I've not purchased from them. But there was a lot they couldn't get, so that's when I went to look for it and manually added it. But it's a large undertaking...I just do it every now and then, a little at a time. I figure by spring 2009 or so I'll have everything matched to a cover, automatically or manually.

[Gargoyle]

Sometimes you just need to make sure your album and artist name that of iTunes exactly. I check iTunes first, and if a missing album art is on iTunes, I just make sure my song, album and artist names match exactly and it normally gets picked up.

As for the other comments, even if you download all your songs and albums, you cannot get away from the fact that as human beings, we can relate images to things a shitload faster than we can relate text items.

I would say that 50% of my album art has pictures of the artist on the front. So if I have seen that artist, I would associate an album cover even if I had never seen that album before. As for the other 50%, I can recognise almost all of it instantly even though I have only played some of the albums/songs a few times.

[Escher]

In my experience with my song collection -- 95% ripped from store-bought CDs -- iTunes is incapable of finding any cover art. That's even though all of my CDs were imported and automatically named from the CDDB database (or whatever else iTunes uses). So yes, for me Cover Flow is useless.

Unfortunately, I just don't have the time or energy to add cover art manually. But maybe one day... when I retire in 30 years... (or sooner if I strike it rich unexpectedly)

[ghoti]

Finding cover art is not such a daunting task. I did this years ago (before iTunes provided cover art) for my 450 or so CDs that I had ripped. Clutter (which I linked to above) will look for cover art for the song you play, and once you pick the best image to use, a single key combination copies the image into all the tracks on that album. It's quite easy to do this for a few albums (say, 10 or 20) every night (takes about as many minutes), and it gives you a much nicer music library. This is also a great opportunity to correct mistakes or change names of albums (remove additional crap in the name, etc), giving you a much better organized library that is more fun to use.

[doublem9876]

what about Corripio?

[Kraetos]

CoverFlow is pointless no matter how you get your music.

[CitizenTony]

Kind of like pscates, I've slowly added the images to my music by dragging and dropping anything that iTunes didn't do automatically. I don't really have that much music so it wasn't that much work.

I never use the feature though. I haven't bought a CD in over 7 or so years now, and I never paid attention to the art then either. I just can't stand turning the iPhone onto it's side and seeing question marks. I wish it were an optional feature that I could turn off.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Kraetos CoverFlow is pointless no matter how you get your music.

I guess you didn't take a look at your poll's results.

[Meltedbutter421]

I just ran the iTunes Artwork Finder (Advanced > Find Album Artwork) and it found all but 254 sounds out of my 3493.
Although I dont use it often, I still like the option of using coverflow.

[kieran]

I never used Coverflow at all. My computers couldn't handle it. (iBook G4 and iMac G4)

But now that I have the iPhone, i like to go through my music like that every once in a while.

[Slahcer]

Well I just use widgets such as Album Art Widget and Amazon Album Art. They are really great!