I was watching the new Finder portion of the Apple WWDC 2007, and saw how they incorporated cover flow into the finder.

So I thought, hey maybe it would be cool if foobar2000 had its own cover flow component for browsing albums. What do you guys think? Feasible? Overkill? Good?

I look after too . It is so good but itunes suxx on itunes we can't choose that the cover was a jpg file named cover.jpg
So it will be a great idea to make cover flow for foobar

I think it'd be great.

thats brilliant nice perfect , go for it...

Not that I intend to do this component myself, but these links might be of interest:
The ElementFlow custom control
Harmony

any update?

the pi

there are another minimalistic, simple and alpha alternative named COVERPLAY

link
in action youtube

the author says "there won't be any more development soon. Sorry."
But if someone can continue the work (with permission of course), perhaps will be possible to implement in fb2k .



In my opinion trying to get work HARMONY it means you are running iTunes and Vista and NET 3.0. Too many monsters for me

Still using DOS 6.2?

You don't need Vista. The thing is that Vista already ships with .NET 3.0, so you only need to install that if you are not running Vista.


This provocation is completely unnecessary.

It doesn't work for me when i open it it closes

But it seems to be a good things.
I am agree with you about The Monsters which are Vista and Itunes

i already knew that isn't necessary install Vista to work Harmony, only NET 3.0. You need otherwise to install iTunes with some library imported in it to work "(Using the library file generated by Apple's iTunes)"
but it's impossible and a suicide (in my opinion) work, enjoy and manage more than 30gb with iTunes as fb2k does.

but it's obvious that fb2k will improve visual with this kind of tricks


sorry my english

Well, just found this Thread and I have good news.
I'm just writing such a plugin. It's not yet implemented into foobar, but that's next.
Here's a little demonstration video (7mb)
http://chron.visiondesigns.de/misc/ChronFlow.avi

Good news but the link doesn't seems to work

sry, corrected

Absolutely awesome!

Looks brilliant! What's the resource use like (at present)?

ooooh baby !

Looks great - I'm sure there'll be lots of early adopters!

This really looks impressive
But one question what will be shown if no cover is availbale? I haven't yet covers for all albums.

If it works without a too heavy footprint, it's great !!

Wow...looking forward to that one!

It's great you ask for performance - since I've tuned that quite a lot and I feared noone would notice .

For cpu-usage: while there is no movement, it's exactly 0. The image is only rendered if there is something changed. This changes once you start moving, of course - but I'm using OpenGl, so with hardware-acceleration it' still all right.

For memory footprint: You need to have quite some covers in memory, to be able to render this rapid movement. The covers are loaded into buffer by a separate thread -- if the movement is faster than the buffer allows, you see something like at 0:40 in the video. So the buffer size is one factor -- I'm buffering 200 covers in the video (what is quite an overkill). The other one is the cover size. I have a lot highres covers, but the size is limited to 512*512 px in the video's setup. With this setup, the memory footprint peaks at 150mb. But with reasonable settings, say 100 Covers, max-size 256*256 the footprint peak goes down to 17MB.


Either these Albums are not shown, or a "no-cover" image is displayed.

Well it sounds nice !!

The next step is to see it integrated to foobar and see how it behaves to add albums etc..

Good luck for the end of the development of this promising plugin. It will be quite useful as you remember some albums thanks to their album art and forget their names.

My album covers are usually pretty high res too. Would it be possible to let the app make an index of more compressed versions of the covers on first use or something? I believe iTunes does it in a similar way. If you know what I mean.

I have a question,
The source of picture are only tag or can we choose where he must search ?
It's a really beautiful work, I wait for the foobar integrated version

Now i tried not to get my hope up. This seem too good to be true. Cover flow for foobar.

Is this real?

It will be really important to allow users to specify where their images are located, as so many people (me included!) store cover images as separate files not as embedded tags - BUT, if you do provide this functionality then users could have another instance of the add-in in another panel to browse by, say, ARTIST images! Fantastic!!

I can't wait to try this...

any updates?

the pi

Any news ??

Chronial ! Wake up !!

Sounds like a great idea

What's happening here ? Chronial is not active since Sept. 17th...

Maybe he is in holiday or he fell in love - who knows? Be patient!

Maybe he fell... period.

Maybe Apple got to him

Maybe it was a hoax?

i don't think so because the video seems to be real
he is certainly occupied so he can't come on the forum

I believe CoverFlow under foobar is technically feasible. We only need a serious developer to do it. Then we will be happy.

There is good developers here, and chronial is one of the best.
I am certain it is not an hoax.
And I am certain too, that letting him the time to work, he will release a very good component.
Patience so...
Cheers to all.
Special smile to chronial

Thanks kabuki ! (nice cat BTW, reminds me of mine )

And thanks in advance to chronial of course. CoverFlow under foobar would be just... totally awesome.

Hehe, well - that was quite a good guess there . Don't worry - I have not forgotten it.

Although it's not released yet, I have a small idea that could make this suprerior to the Apple version:

Add small icons when the mouse is hovered f.ex. at the bottom of a cover, displaying if the album consists of multiple discs. It could even read a "DISCTITLE" tag to show the name of each disc (Bonus CD, Remixes CD or other cases where discs distinguish from the other in an album).

It could show icons like:

CD 1 CD 2 Bonus CD Play All
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )))

This would bring back the "manual" feel of CD's in a digital form.

Edit: I'm sure many people would like a custom defined action for left mouseclick on links.

I'm not sure it would be a good addition, but if it's optional and if it can make people happy, then no problem for me.

Another thing that could eventually make this CoverFlow superior to the Apple version would be 3D-displaying of the real CD cases, not just the covers. I'm talking about the covers, but also the CD names on the case sides, and also the back covers if we decide to flip the CDs.

There is an excellent iTunes plugin (for Mac OS) called JewelCase that does something similar when the music is playing. Look here : http://www.opticalalchemy.com/products.html



Graphically, this is the more realistic thing I've ever seen, period. Better than CoverFlow, better than anything.
If someone manages to actually do quite the same with foobar, then I will be really, really happy.

For the back covers, JewelCase can do two different things to create them :
1/ It can take the front cover, zoom on it, flip it horizontally, and add the track names (see up here).
2/ It can take the front cover, make some kind of "blur" (like if the whole case was transparent), and add the track names (see below) :



Notice that the back cover is also used to create a background for the case sides. It even shows the now-playing track. And the used font (back covers and case side) is also beautiful, very readable IMHO. Last but not least, notice that the font color can be black or white. This could be selected automatically based on the back case's dominant color.

We could imagine a third possibility : show the real back cover when the jpg exists.

Of course it would be even better if we could choose, on a CD by CD basis, if we want the "real back cover", the "front cover zoom", or the "blur effect". That would be totally awesome.

What do you think guys ?

Sounds like a good idea, but needs a lot of maintenance (i would need to scan all my covers by myself, whereas today, I just grab them from iTunes).

Also I think it should take into account, if the cover (depending on the dimensions) belongs to a Digipack like many CD's are released today.

Hi odyssey. Why would you need to scan all your covers ? I also grab them from iTunes (600x600), and then like you know, I use the excellent iTSfv to get them out of iTunes. So I end with a lot of jpgs that are perfectly usable. No need to rescan anything...

To get the back and spine

Um, yes, but it's absolutely not necessary. Personally I find the effect achieved with options 1/ and 2/ even better than a real back cover !

I'm a perfectionist

All cool ideas, I don't know about the original coverflow but is it possible to still browse a really large music collection efficiently?

Cause at first sight it looks like you don't have anything that separates albums from other albums. I mean like in the album list you can choose to sort everything on album artist, year, label, etc etc

At first sight it seems that coverflow just throws everything on one big pile. I'm afraid it's going to get one big mess for huge collections. Or is there some kind of structure? I have not used Itunes recently so can somebody tell me?