Even though I’ve been ripping and burning MP3’s for years, it’s only been since I got my iPhone that I’ve been using my MP3’s for regular playback. Up until now, my MP3’s were simply an easier way to organize and store my music collection. I’ve mostly only used MP3’s as a platform to more easily burn songs to CD or minidisc for enjoyment in the truck, home, or at work. Of course for backyard barbecues and holidays like Halloween, I’d setup a playlist on the computer, and I once burned an MP3 DVD just to test out the feature on a new DVD player. But still, for regular listening I listened to music recorded on hard medium until the iPhone, so I’ve been playing a little catch up on the technology.

Excepting only a few recent album purchases, I’ve kept up with ripping all my CD’s and have every song encoded as an MP3 with artist, album, track, title information. Now recently, since using iTunes, I’ve been adding album art to all my MP3s. The album art displays on the iPhone when a song is played and appears in the album view display on both the phone and the desktop version of iTunes.  I think sliding through the album covers and selecting one to play is the most impressive example of the advantage of the touch navigation and the iPhone’s beautifully rendered graphics.  The Mac makes it easy to add the art because you can simply use a search engine’s, like AllTheWeb, image search function and drag the source image right to the album. It’s also great that if the source image has since been removed and is no longer available, you can just drag the thumnail representation right off the search engine’s results page.  Oddly enough, sometimes these thumbnails even look better than the source image for rare songs where few alternatives available.

I’ve always manually defined the artist’s name on compilation albums because I want the songs to appear when I sort by artist and not just when I search for an artist’s name. For example, I would want Sweet Jane to appear if I were browsing through the Cowboy Junkies, and not have it be sorted with the V’s under “Various Artists” just because it happens to be from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. Storing the albums this way never seems to occur to programmers who write MP3 software and result in somewhat of a mess. For example, in any album view or sort, iTunes treats each song like its own album and separates it from the rest of the tracks. For these, I click select each of the songs on the album, use the Mac’s command-I function, and assign the album art to all the songs at once through the properties window that pops up.  You can also assign multiple art files to your songs, but I haven’t seen a need for that yet and have only assigned one per.

I found a nice widget that automatically looks up whatever song is playing if it doesn’t already have art and finds an image from one of several defined sites (e.g. Amazon).  It’s a good tool because it’s very simple and does exactly what it sets out to do, but I found that I could usually find much better, clearer images on my own.  I also found that it doesn’t like the way I name tracks from compilation albums any better than iTunes, and results in locating the art for the album on which the artist originally released the song and assigns it to the whole album, which is a nuisance.  Another album art tool I’m using is a screen saver that wallpapers the screen with rows and rows of artwork, then randomly flips each one and replaces it with a different album.  I don’t know if it’s new with OS X Leopard or had existed in Tiger too, but I’ve only just noticed it recently.

I also experimented with the iTunes’ store’s custom ringtones, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. To create a ringtone, you need to have purchased the song through the store, so I had to buy a single I already owned, then buy the ringtone made from the track.  I got to pick and adjust the sample of the song that I wanted to rip to a ringtone, but that was more of a curse than a blessing. What I thought sounded great on the Mac is a muted, delayed mess on the iPhone.  I left so much of a pause at the beginning that I might as well have selected dead air.  Now, whenever Maggie calls, the iPhone stops playing music and I hear absolutely nothing and realize it’s her before a note has played, which is not what I was looking for in a ringtone, at least not for $5. I’m going to start checking out some make-your-own ringtone tools and some of the free sites out there and report back what I find. Once I get some that I like, I’ll write how to load them on the iPhone.

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”
Frank Zappa