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Google Play Music app update brings tweaks to Now Playing, Recent, playlists and widget
Ever since introducing the Google Music app in beta last year its developers have been hard at work trimming away the rougher edges and that's never been more evident than in the new 4.3.606 version now available for download. While Google Play Music's overall look hasn't shifted significantly, the changelog and a quick spin using it reveal nearly every screen has had some slight change. As seen above, the recently played screen now features larger album art, while the action bar has been adjusted with different transport controls. In this version, users have the ability to adjust and reorder music in the Now Playing queue, while a refreshed widget shows off album art and allows for thumbs up without opening the app. The settings menu has a direct link to the Nexus Q control app (assuming you can run it, and have one), hit the Play store for the updated version to try it out yourself.
JBL reveals wireless AirPlay speaker dock for iPhone or iPod touch
As you can see above, the JBL On Air Wireless AirPlay is a pretty intriguing speaker dock for your iPhone or iPod. Not only does it sport that Dyson-style ring, but it's got an attached FM radio, a dual alarm clock, and even a screen to display the current name and album art of the song you happen to be listening to. As you can tell by the name, it'll connect up to any AirPlay-enabled device, streaming your songs and media wirelessly for your ears to listen to. Looks great. Of course, at home I already have a nice speaker setup in the living room, but this seems like it would be great for a bedroom or maybe even an office space. The dock should be available to the public this spring, and no price has been announced yet. [via Engadget]
JBL's On Air Wireless AirPlay speaker dock gets official, unavailable to purchase
When we first peeked this AirPlay-enabled speaker dock, we were admittedly excited to see how things would turn out after it made rounds through the FCC. JBL just tossed up the splash page for the On Air Wireless speaker and we've gotta say -- it looks to be a promising means of streaming your jams. The system connects wirelessly to your AirPlay-enabled Mac and iOS device on 4.2 or later and packs a screen that'll display the track info of the song you're rocking out to. What's more, the rounded grill sports a dual alarm clock, FM radio, and a USB port for future firmware updates. As you might have surmised by now, the dock is not yet available for purchase and there's no word on price. If you're interested, though, be sure to hit the source link, sign up for more info and get ready to headbang this spring.
Adding artwork to multiple songs in iTunes 10
iTunes 10 has a cool new feature that allows you to create a Smart Playlist based on whether or not your music has artwork. To use it, simply set "Has Artwork" to "is false" when creating the playlist. You can (optionally) add "Media Kind: is Music" if you want to avoid seeing podcasts, movies, and other items that don't have artwork. I recently decided to clean up my iTunes library. This involved taking all of the music out of the iTunes library and only adding back music that I knew I really liked. I was also making sure the metadata was accurate, including the artwork. I had been adding the artwork via TidySongs, but it had been acting a bit unreliably and claiming that iTunes was not responding (the developers tell me there is a new version available for Windows and a new Mac version is due "soon"). So, I started adding artwork manually. Something very strange has happened that I can't completely explain, so I'll just describe it. I've found songs in my "No Artwork" playlist that had artwork (clearly visible when using Cover Flow), but if I examine the song individually using the inspector, the artwork is indeed missing. I'm not sure how this is happening, but I have noticed a pattern that might give a clue: all of the "phantom" artwork was added by dragging manually to the "Drag Artwork Here" area on the bottom left of the iTunes window while multiple songs from the same album were selected. If I examine the files in the Finder, some of them have the artwork, and some of them don't. Why is this happening? I have no idea. Frankly it makes no sense, and I suspect that there's a bug in there somewhere. (Or maybe that fortuneteller actually did put a curse on me.) Whatever the reason, there does seem to be a workaround. Select all of the songs that you want to apply the artwork to Use command+i to call up the inspector Drag the artwork to the inspector instead of the "Drag Artwork Here" area I don't know why, but that method has worked 100% reliably for me without leaving any "stragglers" lacking artwork. It's a bit of a hassle, but that's a trade-off I'll take for something that works better. Thanks to Guillermo Esteves for drawing my attention to the new iTunes feature.
iTunes 101: Using the Album Art widget
Here's a cool new feature in iTunes 10 that we haven't mentioned yet: when listening to any song in your library, you can double click on the album art window in the lower left hand corner to detach it from the main window and see it full size. That's not new -- you could get a closer look at the art in previous versions of iTunes. But what is new is that when you mouse over that detached art, you now get full QuickTime-style controls for your tracks. You can then minimize the main window (using those weirdly-aligned buttons, of course), and then just control the music directly from that square widget (which can also be resized any way you want). Pretty neat, and somewhat hard to find if you don't usually zoom in to see your album art full size. This replicates some (not all) of the functionality provided by CoverSutra and a number of other "iTunes controllers," so it looks like Apple has (yet again) decided to make a popular function in third-party apps part of the official thing.
Five widgets for Friday
As we've previously pointed out, in many ways, Dashboard Widgets are the precursor to iPhone apps. Need to know when your latest packages will arrive? Yes, there's an app for that. But there's a widget too. Need to figure out how many pesos are in a dollar, or what a Quarter Pounder with Cheese comes out to in the metric system? There's an app, and a widget, for that as well. For this Friday afternoon, here are five useful Widgets to help you make the most of your Mac. And best of all, they're all free.
High quality album art (from Apple)
With Apple emphasizing Cover Flow more and more in the new iPods, etc., the need for good quality album art is ever increasing. I know iTunes is supposed to grab art for songs that are in your library and the iTunes Store, but in my experience it hasn't worked that well. Fortunately, Josh Powell has cooked up a nice little site called Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber that lets you search the iTunes album art repository and download high quality jpgs from Apple's servers. In my brief test (with Springsteen albums), most of the cover art came back as 600 x 600px. However, some albums featured art up to 1425 x 1425 or higher. The search engine is rather strict ("White Stripes" returned nothing, it had to be "The White Stripes"), but this looks like an excellent resource for filling in holes in your collection.[via Digg]
DockArt: Change your iTunes icon to Album Art
DockArt is a nice little iTunes plugin that does something simple, and does it well. When installed it will change the iTunes icon in your dock to the album art of the currently playing track (assuming of course that it has album art). The developer is on the ball and recently released an updated version for iTunes 7. DockArt is a neat little toy that'll offers a very unobtrusive visual reminder of what's playing. Best of all it's a free download from developer Greg Weston, who requests donations for Fidelco.
Get cover art from the iTunes Store without using iTunes
Who says you need to use iTunes 7 to get that sweet, sweet high res album art for the iTunes Store? Jesper Nøhr spent a little time looking at tcpdumps and headers and came up with a Perl script that will download album art for a given artist and album (there is even an online demo). It has been adapted to Python and PHP already. What language is next? I think an Applescript version would be very cool, though I don't know if AppleScript has the necessary functionality.
The I-Deck brings some old school to the iPod
Feeling like something's missing from the digital age of music, with our lists of albums and artists in iTunes and tiny deck-of-cards sized iPods that fit our entire music collections in our pockets? The I-Deck might just be the fusion of old and new school for you. The album art you see is actually a touch screen that allows you to browse your library, right down to flicking the screen to skip a song, and spinning it to fast-forward - all while giving your music's album art the face time (and space) it deserves.We received tips of this at the cool hunter, but there aren't any details on this being an actual product for sale; they simply end their post with "contact us if you require designer's contact details", so we have no idea if the I-Deck will appear in Apple Stores and Targets near you.Thanks to everyone who sent this in
Widget Watch: Album Art Widget
When I first saw Liquidx's Album Art Widget, I thought, "I don't want to have to jump to the Dashboard just to view album art." However, this widget does much more than that.It does display the album art of the currently playing track, and will retrieve artwork for songs that don't have any (adding this found artwork to iTunes is easy). You can also change the ratings of songs, flip the widget over to view a list of other songs on the currently selected album and use it to control iTunes. Lastly, it will let you jump to the current song's home in iTunes or Amazon.
New Menuet skins available
Menuet, the menu bar add-on that lets you control iTunes, view album art and more, has been updated to version 1.0.1. The update includes several new "iPod" skins in six colors. I registered a copy soon after Scott found it at Macworld in January and now I use it every day. Other changes in 1.0.1 are: Improved Growl song information bezel Fixes for the high-resolution album art grabber Fixes to and improvements for the registration and demo process Various squashed bugs Plus, this version is a universal binary. Menuet requires Mac OS 10.4 and a single license will cost you a worthwhile $12.95.
