Apple doesn't care about album cover art

I went into the article expecting someone else to eloquently echo my own thoughts and issues with Apple fucking with my album art, but this is so tame compared to what I’m experiencing.<p>Basically, anyone who’s ever had a greatest hits compilation seems to get their “actual” studio album art replaced with the art of that compilation album at random.<p>For example, off the top of my head, when I’m in the album section for Low, “Heroes”, or Lodger (three David Bowie albums with iconic cover art and even better music), the only image on the page is for a different, shitty compilation album that I’ve never owned, listened to, or have any interest in whatsoever.<p>But things somehow get worse as you’re listening to the album. Each song gets a different cover, seemingly at random. In fact, on “Heroes” alone, an album originally with ten songs (my reissued version has two extra), I have FIVE (5!) different album covers, (one of which is the original, attached to only the fifth, tenth, and bonus songs).<p>I’m so baffled by this decision and literally cannot conceive of anyone, sane or otherwise, asking for this or even thinking that it’s anything other than the worst possible way to handle album art.

Eh, I see this more as a shift in consumer design patterns overall.<p>At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books.<p>Now that people don&#x27;t have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music.<p>Additionally, the original iPod&#x2F;iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.

Maybe album cover art is just less meaningful in the year 2021. I couldn&#x27;t care less what the album art looks like when listening to music on Spotify or YouTube.<p>What I do care about is a current &quot;About&quot; tab in Spotify, a WikiPedia page, or maybe a well-maintained webpage for&#x2F;by the artist.<p>Not meant to be an indictment of visual art of this type, just suggesting that perhaps the &quot;vector&quot; needs to shift elsewhere.<p>Good example is the backgrounds created by Cryo Chamber for their YT postings: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SbKDlzQgIwc</a>

Maybe this is my fault for not moving to Apple Music, but the iOS Music app, subjectively, is total crap ever since iOS 9.<p>The app no longer cleanly and easily divides music into Songs&#x2F;Artists&#x2F;Albums&#x2F;Playlists as top-level tabs, instead shunting them into menu items within one such tab. The older apps (pre-iOS 7?) even let the user customize which top-level tabs they wanted to see (e.g. Composer).<p>Again, I bet a lot of this pain would go away if I started using Apple Music, but I&#x27;m bothered by a loss in UX.

Tesla doesn&#x27;t either.<p>Tesla can read your music from USB flash drives. This is wonderful, because they have a premium audio system (used to cost $2500) and you could play high-quality music.<p>You could load a drive with FLAC or Apple Lossless music and play it back without MP3 lossiness and artifacts.<p>Yet album art? they do not care.<p>Here&#x27;s a thread on how the USB player is a buggy unsupported mess. It recently lost the ability to display album art, but there are plenty of other problems (like no playlist support or any number of other problems)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teslamotorsclub.com&#x2F;tmc&#x2F;threads&#x2F;comprehensive-usb-bug-list.77775&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teslamotorsclub.com&#x2F;tmc&#x2F;threads&#x2F;comprehensive-usb-bu...</a><p>This thread has &gt; 2000 posts going back 5 years and it is updated almost daily.

Glad to see one of my pet peeves finally get some notice!<p>I too bought an iPod Touch back in 2008 because of how the player UI treated album art: as actual &#x27;art&#x27;, and deserving of a full-width display on the screen. I would meticulously tag my music library with the correct album art files precisely so that they would be displayed nicely on my portable player.<p>I think one reason the art got smaller is due to phone screens getting larger and higher-res. A full-width image spanning the iPhone SE would be 214 x 214 px. But on the iPhone 12 it would be 390 x 390px.<p>That would take up a lot of the screen&#x27;s real estate, perhaps leaving less available for UI controls. Also, if digital album art tends to be low-res to begin with, it would look pixelated if displayed at full width on a high density pixel screen.<p>Digital album

Apple quality and design, especially in UI, has been steadily declining for over a decade. This is just another example.<p>Unfortunately the alternatives are even worse.

Another minor beef: Rounded corners for an album cover image don&#x27;t make sense, either historically or aesthetically. Just give us the full image please, Apple.

Design at Apple is lost. But there is no better alternative. Widows is a joke of UI&#x2F;UX. I blame flat design and fear of skeumorphism trends. Cover art is “emotional” element and it must be visible and beautiful, the idea that you don’t need this is stupid. Actually you need a modern implementation, but for what it would be, I have ideas and exchange them for money, not for likes or karma. :)

I was listening to James Hetfield on the Joe Rogan Experience a few months back and he highlighted an experienced I completely forgot existed: <i>buying albums solely based on album art</i>.<p>I remember as a kid walking through the aisles of albums, floating around certain genres, and deciding on what to purchase purely because of an album cover. Band I had never heard of, well, look at that cover!

&quot;Why isn’t it touching the edges of the screen?&quot;<p>Why should it? One of the reasons it shouldn&#x27;t touch is because it artificially creates a full-bleed line that separates the content and conveys that they are disconnected when they aren&#x27;t.<p>&quot;Why can’t I read the album name from the cover?&quot;<p>It can&#x27;t be read because that&#x27;s apparently what the artist intended. Many album covers don&#x27;t even have the album title printed on it.<p>&quot;why can’t I see that The Who took a piss on the monolith?&quot;<p>You can&#x27;t read everything even on 1:1 replication of the album; but your phone is unconditionally smaller than an actual album cover.<p>&quot;So much creativity, imagination and artistry thrown in the bin for no good reason.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not throwing anything away; it&#x27;s making up for numerous design constraints.

My father has been going bonkers about trying to just set his own album art in itunes about the library he maintains of cd rips. The dialog for setting the cover art just doesn&#x27;t work. You can choose the image, it doesn&#x27;t report any errors or anything went wrong, but it never sets the album image.<p>The only thing I managed to get to work was if you can find the album in the itunes store, and match all the metadata, you can get the automatic metadata logic to set it properly for you.<p>But he has some esoteric versions of albums, and he wants to use those album covers that itunes doesn&#x27;t have in their db.

I remember everyone cheering when Apple said they were replacing iTunes with Music.app on OSX.<p>Upgraded recently and I&#x27;m shocked at the regression, it actually feels so slow compared to iTunes and having to go into an album page and back to album menu rather than just rolling the album open in-situ like on iTunes is insufferable.<p>Things for music library users are just being made worse and worse to make it more consistent with how Apple Music works.<p>No care if it&#x27;s better for the user or not.

Another takeaway from this post is the album, as a unit of music, falling out of vogue. The album name doesn&#x27;t show up anywhere on the Spotify&#x2F;Apple Music UI - you have to go deep into the artist pages (?) to find it. Streaming is the main mode of consuming music for most people, and streaming platforms only care about the number of plays.<p>It is sort of sad, because some of the best pieces of music over the last century have been albums where the songs are tied together in some sort of progression - these are often called concept albums. The Wall, Ziggy Stardust, American Idiot are a few examples that come to mind. Soon there might come a day when nobody actually takes the time to listen to an album from start to finish.

I just recenly added cover art to the main window of my Tiny Player for Mac application. It was one of the most requested features. Seems like people like looking at covers while listening. While it is not edge to edge in my case, I’m considering it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catnapgames.com&#x2F;tiny-player-for-mac&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.catnapgames.com&#x2F;tiny-player-for-mac&#x2F;</a>

In my car when spotify is playing through carplay I get a nice album art on my screen and between my dials, it also uses the colour as a blurred background effect, quite nice and makes me appreciate the art even if i&#x27;m (hopefully) not directly looking at it.

Static album cover art is more nebulous in the streaming age. What&#x27;s interesting is the different approaches users and musical groups have taken to accompanying video on platforms like YouTube. There is not yet a de facto standard to replace the static square image of yesteryear, but there are a lot of interesting one-offs.

This related issue:<p>&gt; And why can’t I see the album name anywhere on the UI? ↩<p>is also a problem. Apple is trying hard to destroy the concept of an &quot;Album&quot;

Sadly, I think it&#x27;s just that the world has moved on from albums as &quot;coveted&quot; goods that you treasure to just being commodities. With music streaming services, each album isn&#x27;t as precious as the old days where you&#x27;d actually purchase a CD, a cassette, or a vinyl record. There&#x27;s just so much music out there now, and so readily available. IMHO, as a result, how albums are presented is now just an afterthought.

I really hate how little space is used for album art on iOS iTunes, it&#x27;s even more pathetic if you try to plug an iPad into your stereo and imagine that it would have a nice big image of the album art filling that gorgeous display like it used to do, hahahaha NOPE, you get a crappy little popup that&#x27;s the same size as the goddamn iPhone player, no cover art you can recognize when you look up from a chair across the room for <i>you!</i><p>I also hate that despite there being a &quot;lyrics&quot; tag lurking in every track it is never pre-filled when I buy music off of Apple&#x27;s store, I always have to go visit dodgy lyrics sites and cut and paste. Admittedly this is more a problem with the entire setup for distributing music digitally, I would bet money that even if a musician <i>does</i> stick lyrics into their uploads, it will get stripped out somewhere along the way when it&#x27;s transcoded into whatever format you&#x27;re actually buying.

Spotify on the desktop is also guilty of this: the default cover art view is microscopic; clicking the &quot;expand&quot; button brings it up to a merely small view.

If you think this is bad you should see how terrible the photo app &quot;Instagram&quot; is for viewing photographs.

My pet peeve about album cover art is digital music distributors padding non-square covers with white margins. They look like shit in almost all the UIs that don&#x27;t have a white background.

This is what happens when a charismatic leader of a tech company dies (2012). Who ever is running the company doesn&#x27;t have the essence of what created iPod. Just mass consumerism now.

This post complains about the cover art being too small on iOS, but my complaint is that on macOS iTunes by-album view ditched the art size slider a few years ago, and picked a fixed size that is so big that you can only see about a dozen albums at a time on a 13&quot; laptop screen. This change was so obnoxious I actually looked in to ditching iTunes entirely, but there just wasn&#x27;t a decent alternative that made editing metadata as easy and would sync with my iPod.<p>Speaking of which...

Have they implement the simple idea of respecting the integrity of an album? I have to admit not having messed with music on iPhone for many years because of this. Did it improve?<p>What I mean is: I want to listen to the Brandenburg Concerto or The Wall from start to finish and in order. Not possible for so long I gave up.<p>The other aspect of this was wanting to import a sizable music library from Windows Media consisting of dozens of CD’s I own. A total mess, including the aforementioned problem.

Apple automatically started using one of our band&#x27;s album covers as the artist image. When I submitted an new artist logo they turned it down because artist &#x2F; band logos are not allowed. They only allow faces. The thing is, the band can have anyone as an artist, so we decided to keep the ugly album cover that Apple automatically used as the artist image (which is not even according to their guidelines btw.)

I liked iTunes back in the Steve Jobs days when, if album art wasn’t available, in its place it would display the album info on the diagonal against a white background, as if it were an old bootleg with stamped info on a white record sleeve. As a collector&#x2F;listener of bootlegs I appreciated that little bit of skeuomorphism.

&gt;<i>Apple doesn&#x27;t care about Album Cover Art</i><p>Apple? Has anybody (maybe except cover designers) cared about Album Cover Art ever since the transition to CD? And it went downhill with Napster etc. downloads (zero cover art 99% of the time), and later with official stores and streaming (small cover art).<p>Heck, with video games, good TV series, Netflix, internet, social media, youtube, mobile versions of the above, and so on, available the last decade or so, I think people (including the younger demographic) care less about music than ever since the time of Elvis. It&#x27;s just not as big as a cultural deal anymore as the &quot;escape&quot; it represented for some kind up to the 80s-90s, now it&#x27;s just one more thing in a whole range of available diversions...

It&#x27;s funny that everyone is saying physical media is dying - that might be true for the majority of the population, but for niche music collectors vinyl is making a big comeback. I personally have a growing collection of a few dozen vinyl albums, and I&#x27;m 26, so I didn&#x27;t exactly grow up with that format.<p>I know of at least one artist who did a simplified album cover for their streaming content, but for the physical version of the album you open up the cover and see the full work of art that was left out of the digital version (hard to explain, but you get the idea). I think that&#x27;s a really cool way to bridge the physical-digital gap and reward people who like collecting albums as a form of physical art.

Cover art is a non-trivial part of the album experience. Consider &#x27;Sgt. Pepper&#x27;, &#x27;Revolver&#x27;, &#x27;Unknown Pleasures&#x27;, &#x27;Rage Against the Machine&#x27;, or &#x27;Nevermind&#x27; without thinking of the cover image.

I agree that cover art should be shown as large as possible for older works. I remember looking at my Lateralus CD cover art over and over again. It’s sleeve and a series of holograms and transparent pages that really push the limits of what you can do with 2D. In a static image in Apple Music, you won’t ever get the same feeling even if the image was 3 times larger.<p>That said, someone developing art for music no longer has to stick to sheets and 2D, Spotify or Apple Music can provide visualizations and info with the music that can do far more than the album art can. Tool was dealing within the confines of a jewel cd case, but that’s no longer a constraint.

As a complete aside, I have a fondness for that older layout, back when I used to dip my toe in the jailbreak scene I used a tweak which sampled the album art and changed the layout colours to match the album cover - I think it was called “colourflow”<p>I always wondered why Apple didn’t integrate something similar into the player<p>Here’s a selection of album covers from my screenshots at the time (I used a different font as my system font for several of them): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;6rZ3JSY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;6rZ3JSY</a>

At least it&#x27;s static. Spotify keeps pushing music videos as cover art for singles and it&#x27;s annoying as hell. If I wanted to see a video, I would&#x27;ve used other platforms.

Both Spotify and Apple Music make it really hard to see album art. It seems they just don&#x27;t care about it. They show tiny thumbnails, and there&#x27;s no way to make it bigger.<p>But it&#x27;s not like artists care either. 99% of artist websites just have low resolution pictures as well.<p>I recently bought an LP, mainly for the album art, and when I unwrapped it at home I realised that they apparently sent 72 DPI files to the printer.<p>I just don&#x27;t get it. They make all this elaborate artwork, and then they only let you see thumbnails.

I don&#x27;t know if there is a term for this already, but [1] really shifted my mindset. Basically if you own the platform &#x2F; store there is a strong incentive to reduce the ability of products to keep their brand-authority.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;style&#x2F;amazon-trademark-copyright.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;11&#x2F;style&#x2F;amazon-trademark-co...</a>

It&#x27;s weird complaining that you can&#x27;t see details in the album art anymore, when in terms of raw size and resolution the art on a newer iPhone today is larger than it was on an iPod Touch in 2012 even if it doesn&#x27;t stretch all the way to the edge of the screen.<p>I personally like Spotify&#x27;s approach to evolving album art, where artists can use full-screen video clips or other visualizations (mostly taken from their music videos).

That‘s why I use the sleevenote app, which defaults to showing only the cover as large as possible. They even plan to build a square-screen music player :-D

I sympathize in spirit, even if I never used iTunes back in the day, because I refused in principle to pay for digital goods and preferred to buy the CDs and rip them myself. Amazon AutoRip being the sole exception, because that seems to just be a convenience feature for something I was going to do anyway.<p>Compared to the &quot;all-streaming&quot; future, however, sure, I&#x27;ll take iTunes over <i>that</i> any day.

I suspect they wouldn&#x27;t go to the effort in supporting animated cover art[0] if they didn&#x27;t care.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;music.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;album&#x2F;gigaton&#x2F;1495371272" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;music.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;album&#x2F;gigaton&#x2F;1495371272</a>

Is this because the images that they obtained 10-20 years ago are much lower resolution and look pixelated if expanded to the resolution of modern retina screens?<p>I&#x27;ve just looked at Baba O&#x27;Reiley on Apple music on my iphone plus 8 and the artwork is as wide as the text&#x2F;controls.

Apple legally bought Cover Flow from the inventors, but was sued by patent troll Mirror Worlds LLC. Mirror Worlds was awarded $625.5 million in damages, but Apple appealed and won. Apple then got their own design patent on Cover Flow, but doesn&#x27;t seem to use it any more.

Two more gripes:<p>- Why does the album art on the lock screen have to be so small I can barely make out what is playing?<p>- Why can&#x27;t we have what was on the back of the album too? (And the gatefold for those slightly over indulgent double albums).<p>I would switch in a heartbeat to a service that gave us the latter!

If you want to appreciate the album art then purchase the LP. A tiny JPEG on AM or Spotify UI is never going to cut it for anybody who is interested in inspecting the cover art. These tools are designed for background listening

Albums are so last-cen. In the Apple ecosystem, the unit of sale is the song.

The album art is more than sufficiently large on their modern screen sizes.

PSA: I made an alternative Apple Music client that has huuuuge album art - flush to the edges regardless of screen size<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shelf.fm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shelf.fm</a>

What&#x27;s the alternative option? Stretch and pixelate the album art so it&#x27;s larger on the screen?<p>Personally, I wouldn&#x27;t use a music player to view album art.

Worse imo, the artist listing using photos of the band or artist as the image instead of a cover of an album - which makes it useless for visual scanning.

I care deeply about cover art and sneer at any philistine who does not also care deeply about cover art.<p>&quot;For the love of money is the root of all evil&quot;

At least they don&#x27;t ban nudity in album cover art (it&#x27;s very common in cover art). Including in third-party apps like Spotify.

Buy the LP if you care about album art.

FWIW YouTube Music does a good job showing album art (which I appreciate)

No, neither do I and neither do most people. The music is what matters. If you want to look at the album art, nothing is preventing you from simply finding the picture and staring at it.<p>What a stupid, meaningless thing to rant about and what a stupid meaningless thing to upvote on HN.

Wow that blog is awesome, mostly random short posts like this.

You are funding this by continuing to buy apple products.

Yeah, looks like a device specific issue wrapped with a preference on margin around the artwork. Apple could shut this guy up by expanding the album art full screen when tapped in the player view.

Oh, the irony.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iili.io&#x2F;qkNFd7.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iili.io&#x2F;qkNFd7.png</a>

Comcast doesn&#x27;t care about customer name, address, or phone number... they only look at your IP address...<p>Because the last 2 times I asked for credits, they sent it to the wrong account even if I gave them the correct name, address and phone number... once they even sent a technician to the wrong address because I was using their connection when I asked for support.

What a neurotic thing to complain about. &quot;Oh no, my pretty pictures are slightly smaller. Apple doesn&#x27;t care!&quot;.

This distresses me greatly. Many otherwise great UI&#x27;s and devices needlessly waste screen space and display tiny album art. Why? who wants a small image in the center, surrounded by vast, boring block colour. But even worse is Apple who seem to have taken a decisive step backwards. &quot;let&#x27;s take a great display choice and break it!&quot; Apple execs must have discussed excitedly, probably after several beers.

At the risk of going off topic: it feels like modern day Apple&#x27;s priorities have shifted a lot from the Apple I grew up with, and many things they used to put front-and-center are falling by the wayside, out of neglect.<p>This isn&#x27;t some generic &quot;they don&#x27;t care about the mac anymore&quot; refrain, but I think there is a major sea change underway at the company. I think I will write soon about all of the hints, as I see them.