Quote: Originally Posted by
NeonDev 
i say just do the embedded art. if people are going to be finicky and demand all their art work there are several 3rd party apps/scripts that will go through itunes and embed all their downloaded art directly to the mp3/aac
also good job on sticking with it. good to hear the cover flow is actually usable. I was going to question how fast it was before. you see cover flow is the reason those itc files exist in the first place, it is much faster for itunes somehow ;-)
from everything that i have read about coverflow, the .itc file is what makes it fast. not actually the file itself but the fact that itunes doesn't have to extract the image from the music file before displaying. essentially i am going to have to do the same thing for speed reasons. i will have to have a separate file/location for the images to let the app quickly find the images and display them. The good thing about the coverflow component that i am using is that it will cache the images so that it is not having to run out to your drive everytime that you switch images. another thing that i like is the fact that it only renders the picture when there is no movement. as soon as you start an animation, the 3d engine reduces the amount of rendering to almost zero until the image comes to resting position. all in all it is pretty neat and quick.
Quote: Originally Posted by
Bugbyte This is the most expedient way to do it. If you want the artwork, download one of the scripts that embeds it and run it.
yeah that is one of the options that i am considering, however i am trying to keep the app portable. there are plenty of applescripts and such that will go out and grab the artwork, but what about windows? now dont misunderstand me, i am building my project primarly for everybody in this forum, so if it came down to it i would use those and make the app nearly osx only. but it would be nice to use the app on any os you choose.
Quote:
It's ridiculous to try and work around the iTunes issues.
i agree itunes is really killing me here. i think that i am leaning towards what NBB is doing, in that he is just pointing to a folder with music in it and going from there. I think i may do the same thing. im thinking of just having the user point to their music folder and then my app will traverse the folder and sub folders, looking for music and artwork, and then build out my own xml file to speed the process of finding a particular song/album/artist. i will make my itcdecoder a seperate app that the user can use if they don't want to redownload their artwork. it will be up to the user to place the correct album art inside the album folder.
either way there will be some user involvement but i guess when you think about it, even with iTunes there is user involvement if you want album art so i am just not going to kill myself trying. if someone, someday comes up with a better solution i will be more than happy to try it out.
thank you everybody for your input and suggestions.