iTunes 8 has a new feature i’d been wanting for a while - grid view. Giving you the ability to view your music in a simple grid, much like iPhoto, grouped by album, artist, or genre. Normally you’ll see album artwork in this view; switching to genre view, however, shows some campy artwork for certain popular genres (pop, rock, hip-hop, etc) but is missing artwork for more specific / niche genres. A post on the iLounge forum details how to create custom genre artwork but it’s a little more verbose than need be and geared at the Windows audience. So here’s the briefer version for OS X.
- Close iTunes if it is running.
- Open your Applications folder (⌘⇧A).
- Control- / Right- Click on the iTunes icon.
- Select “Show Package Contents” - this will open a new Finder window.
- Open the “Contents” directory. Here you will find JPG images that begin with “genre-”, these are the files iTunes uses for its genre artwork. Those ending in ‘M’ are for movies.
- Copy one of these files to your Desktop by dragging it and holding Option (⌥).
- Edit this file to your liking and rename it to the genre of your choice, for example “genre-metal.jpg” for metal.
- Move it back into the Contents folder.
- Now open “genres.plist” in your favourite text editor (TextEdit will work).
- Copy one of the
<dict> entries and paste it into the list (making sure to do this between other entries, that is after a closing tag: </dict>).
<dict>
<key>matchString</key><string>rock</string>
<key>resourceFile</key><string>genre-rock.jpg</string>
</dict> |
- Now edit the entry you just pasted to match the genre you are replacing. The
matchString (in this case “rock”) becomes the word or phrase you want itunes to search for1 and the resourceFile (in this case “genre-rock.jpg”) becomes the name of the image you just copied into the Contents directory.
- Save the file and launch iTunes. You should see your new genre art in the grid view now.
1: The matchString appears to match around special characters. For instance the entry for R&B is “r b” but still matches the string “R&B” in iTunes. Also note that this string does not need to be a perfect match. A matchString of “metal” would also match the string “Epic Metal” or “Power Metal”.
About 4 years ago i made the switch. You know, the one they used to talk about in all those ads. I bought a little 12″ Powerbook and loved it. OS X - Panther (10.3) at the time - was infinitely more stable, attractive, and functional that Windows which i’d given up a few years before and didn’t require as much work as my Gentoo/Fluxbox setup i ran at the time. The laptop itself was just as portable as and much more powerful than the Gateway (remember them?) Solo i was replacing.
I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy - really who would wantonly label themselves as such - but i’d been fairly loyal for the most part since that powerbook. But lately things have just felt off with AAPL. Specifically with their mega product launch recently of the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and MobileMe. All of which have been getting less than stellar reviews.
Updating to the iPhone 2.0 firmware was a rather painful experience for most on release day. I for one was left with the dreaded Error -9838 as were many others. The firmware itself is getting bad press over slow downs, problems answering calls, battery life, and unresponsiveness as well.
MobileMe has been down for ages and Apple has at least had the sense to extend the trial twice. I was personally able to access the syncing features and email of MobileMe fairly early on but wasn’t able to log in to the website. I sent in a support ticket and was eventually responded to with how to reset my password which i’d already done. I replied as such and got no response. Shortly thereafter i was unable to log in to any of the MobileMe services. No phone service is available for MobileMe and the website simply greets you with this gem:
I’m sorry but insanely large amounts of support requests are not exactly the same as “overwhelming interest”…
I know i’m being a little bias right now as i’ve had a slew of issues with Apple’s latest release bonanza but i just worry that maybe they’re spreading themselves a bit too thin at present and should dial back a bit. I will likely continue to support them in hopes that this is a mid-life crisis of sorts and that things will settle down soon.
Update: Just ran across an article on the 37 Signals blog on iPhone 2.0 that i felt appropriate to link: iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash.