Cover Flow view

Jeff

Re your second point: This is not my experience, all my album art is onscreen i the CoverFlow view on launch.

Regards

TD

Mine is not and a I would agree that it kind of detracts from the point of it if you can't see any albums until you stop scrolling. Its OK if you scroll really slowly.

I have around 9000 tunes, perhaps the larger the library the more it needs to think about things?

I'm having the same issue with cover art not loading for a couple of seconds as you scroll through albums (on a 15-inch PowerBook w/a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 and 1 GB SDRAM, as well as a 15-inch iMac G5). And I've got just over 1,000 songs in my PowerBook collection (a bit more on the iMac). It's not a big issue but it's not nearly as instantaneous as the original CoverFlow. And what happened to fullscreen view like CoverFlow has? I'm THRILLED this has been incorporated into iTunes, and applaud Apple for buying the technology from the CoverFlow creator(s?), but there are still some bugs to be worked out.

iMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Gary

My library has some 16k+ tunes. I suspect that this is a caching issue and that as the cache is built up the problem will go away.

Regards

TD

I'm having exactly the same problem -- also with playlists that only have a few dozen songs in them. It kind of makes Cover Flow completely pointless, if you always have to wait for the album art to load. (iMac G5 with 2GB RAM ought to be enough for a fast responce!)

Hope Apple fixes this. For the time being, I find it useless.

This looks like a cache issue to me. Once I scrolled through and cached all of the album covers it works flawlessly for me. 5000 song library.

I LOVE Clover Flow!!!!

Well my understanding of a cache is that its not permanent, so again a little pointless. I can't keep itunes open all the time just to keep the cache alive and for sure once the mac is restarted then the coverflow is back to slow.

I boot into XP to play games so keeping OSX running all the time again is not possible.

This is hardly a deal breaker, it just detracts significantly from the purpose of browsing by album cover. what actually happens is you land up looking at the titles and stopping at something. The album picture then loads.

Well you could do that before, not as snazzy looking perhaps but you could do that.

I like most of all itunes 7, some friends are complaining that SPIDF output is now broken for 16 bit DACS, I do not have this issue and I have noticed a distinct slow down in the 'feel' of the application, not nearly as snappy. But to be fair its basically back to beta and there is a lot more graphics going on.

Gary

Well my understanding of a cache is that its not permanent,

While cache is not permanent it is persistant, so it will survive restarts. Most applications create caches. Have a look in your home/library/caches folder, or HD/library/caches folder.

Regards

TD

I agree. This is really annoying.
Hope there'll be a fix soon. Or in the new os.

The cache survives restarts. Very speedy on my powerbook G4. Cover Flow rocks!

Well, my cache doesn't even survive going to another playlist and returning to the first one! And choosing a playlist isn't enough to fill the cache -- I have to slowly scroll through the whole list. And on my G5 it is anything but speedy. In a word, it's useless.

It sounds like your experience is dramatically different from mine. Maybe there's a bug or conflict for those of us where it doesn't work -- some of the album art (very little) does actually seem to make it into the cache. Movie poster frames, for example, do not at all. Repairing preferences didn't help.

There may be an element of luck in this.

I read on MacinTouch earlier that with the volumen of downloads (both Mac and PC) and folks trying to download Album Art, that the Apple servers are getting sme serious strain, and maybe the delay is because of the app trying to download from over worked servers. If this is the case, things should improve once the initial surge is over in a day or two.

Regards

TD

Every single on of my 9000 tunes has album art already, I also told the itunes not to connect to music store to update the art, yet its still slow.

The whole application is slow, I think we got hit with another apple Beta.

Incidentally trying to drag pictures into either the well on the left or into the list view album simply creates a new song file named after the JPG, where by it immediately deletes having realised its not a song file. frankly this new version is little more than a mess with cover flow cludged in. Luckily I have the old version and am going back to that.

Thanks for everyone's help though.

I will reply here since i have a similar PowerBook G4 1.0 GHz.

I am also experiencing the blank album art (musical note image) for many
of my custome albums. Scrolling slowly through the entire collection will
load each of the arts but it doesn't seem the images are made to cache
and they will become blank album arts again.
I did not experience the original stand-alone CoverFlow appication but
this implimentation in iTunes seems to be not perfect yet.
By the way, when I say "custome albums" I mean none of the albums are
store bought, they are all home-made personal albums and this
coverflow is screwing up the flow of only 71 albums.
I figured I'd mention it's here only 71 albums because i could understand
not caching the art for thousands of album art but should be no problem
to flow all the covers of a mear 71 albums !?
_Actually, iTunes7.0(70) seems to only show the albums that are within
the view space (the albums you can see before they fade away into darkness)
about 17 album arts, and it has to keep re-loading what is outside of that
view space.

Also, I notice that in 'Album view' they cover art images once loaded get
cashed and do nto need to be reloaded.

White background _____________
while I'm here might as well talk about the dead black space of cover flow view?
I'd like a white background not black. White is used for the album view mode so
it's possible with cover flow view maybe soon ?

Hope this gets fixed in iTunes7.0.1

I should add that I am happy it works at all seeing as the original CoverFlow
application was for Tiger (10.4) and it's at least working on this 10.3.9 PowerBook.

I just noticed that all the album art images stay displayed, no blanks, if
the drive the files are on is de-mounted.