Two Years Later, Cover Flow Still Sucks
September 8th, 2008It’s September, folks, and we all know that means: football, free stuff on the sidewalks, and yet another batch of shiny new iPods from Apple. While people who do that sort of thing for a living are prognosticating all sorts of fancy crap for the new lines, there’s really only one thing I want to see: the quick and painful death of Cover Flow.
While it may seem like just another example of Jobs buying and/or stealing someone else’s idea and pawning it off as “innovation” (see also: Dashboard, Spaces and pretty much everything else), Cover Flow is unique among Apple’s line in that it’s complete and utter garbage.
Now before you get your irrationally-tight blue jeans in a knot over how awesomely retro cover flow is, stop and act like you’re a useful human being. Do a cost benefit analysis. Benefits of cover flow: You get top sift through postage stamp-sized images of your favorite album covers. That’s it. Costs? Where do I begin…
First of all, it kills your ability to quickly parse a list of music. While the mind scans images more quickly than words (this is why favicons are so awesome), Cover Flow lets you see nine albums at a time, tops. Of these 9 albums, you can maybe tell what 3 or 4 of them are. No problem if you’ve got every corner of every album cover in your 20,000 song collection memorized, but for those of us who aren’t idiot savants, it’s a real thorn in the grundle.
Awesome! Three copies of Elephunk! But what the hell is that off to the left?
This problem is complicated by the fact that iTunes is just way too stupid to have the responsibility of assigning songs to albums. Miss a hyphen? A capital letter? Misspell a band name? You’re gonna get three different albums. It’s not that iTunes can’t figure out what art to assign; it just can’t tell that three discs with the same art, title, and band name belong to the same freakin’ album.
Ok, sweet. I finally found Van Morrison. But what’s all this other crap?
This is, of course, assuming you have art in the first place. But if you’re below age 30 or so, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you came into a fair chunk of your collection via Napster, Scour, Limewire, BitTorrent, or what have you. Over 30, and you’ve probably brought everything in from CD. Either way, That means lots of ugly, useless space-holding images in your Cover Flow. It’s as if Steve Jobs and his evil cabal convened in their Cupertino War Room and asked “how can we shame self-conscious yuppies into paying us money for music that they already have?”
Wow, this is almost as fun as looking through identical, unlabeled folders in real life!
Apple’s real crime with Cover Flow, though, was bringing it into the OS. Maybe, if Preview were somehow disabled and you had a folder entirely filled entirely with images, Cover Flow would be an acceptable means of sorting through it. But for the most part, it’s just a slow, inconvenient bit of eye candy that brings to mind the condescending, overdone metaphor of Microsoft BOB.
Cover Flow is Apple at its worst: shiny, overpacked, and buggy. Sure, it looks real cool on TV ads, and if the compugods are smiling on His Jobsness, it’ll look fly when unveils it for the fanboys. But Apple’s recent purple patch is fueled largely by the popular perception that its stuff just works; by any standard you can imagine, Cover Flow just doesn’t.
Tags: cover flow, iPod, Steve Jobs
September 10th, 2008 at 6:22 am
Actually, they give you cover art for free even for your existing music, if only you have an iTunes Store account. So you’re a bit off here.
September 10th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Your faith in that process leads my to believe your experience with it is limited. Try it with a Beatles album and see what happens.
Better yet, try it with a one-hit wonder you stole back in high school (“Tangerine Speedo” by Caviar, for example). Napster made it a bear to snag entire albums, so you just entered artist and track and hit “download”.
10 years later, iTunes still can’t take those two bits of data and infer an album & cover art for you. I don’t even care what art shows up—album, movie soundtrack, compilation, whatever—but iTunes just refuses to man up and pick one.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Cosmo has poor iTunes metadata hygiene.
I have spectacular iTunes metadata hygiene, and I still have tons of albums with no artwork (not mention the albums with bad or indescript artwork). Classical music is particularly challenging. Good luck finding the artwork for a classical album you ripped pre-iTunes.
September 10th, 2008 at 9:17 am
In my defense, my metadata standards predate iTunes, Wikipedia, and Gracenote. Artist and song seemed perfectly acceptable, given the effort involved in nailing down anything else back when.
October 19th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
iTunes art work just sucks. I have more music without cover art then in Media Player. I also think it sucks that you cant move media player songs to my iPod. I am going to throw my iPod in the trash and just get a normal player. Love my iMac but hate the rest of iAnything
October 19th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I don’t mind CoverFlow so much in iTunes. (Don’t mind = Don’t love but it doesn’t give me any great problems.)
But when they brought it into the OS it really messed things up. You have that wretched CoverFlow image taking up the top half of the window, and then when you go down into the list of files and folders below it, try and open a folders and see what you get. Half the time you get catapulted to the top of the list and have to scroll down again to get where you were. It’s quite frustrating. I used to find Apple better for going through folders than Windows, which was painful, messy, and non-intuitive, but with CoverFlow they’ve taken a massive step backwards. Luckily with a click you can opt for the old “list of folders/file icons” method, otherwise I would have started to consider leaving the Apple fold.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
You can turn that off dummy. Why did you spend mad time creating this.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I spent “mad time” creating this because having to turn it off every time I reinstall the OS is annoying, and because it irritates me to know that somewhere on my disk, 1s and 0s have been gobbled up to make space for it.
Also, you can’t turn it off on the iPhone. So every time your handset goes even remotely horizontal, you lose the “next track” and “back” controls, and even if you’re on shuffle, you’re forced to page slowly through the albums to find another track you want. I’m not paying eighty bucks a month for that kind of frustration.
December 3rd, 2008 at 6:28 pm
The first two paragraphs were right on, but then the main weaknesses of cover flow were sort of overlooked. I’m even a person that likes the idea of browsing music using album covers, and thought cover flow looked pretty sweet at first, but my OCD tendencies make it unusable in its current implementation.
If you have two albums with the same name (like “Greatest Hits”), the songs from both albums are thrown together. You could rename each “greatest hits” and “best of” album, but this seems unnecessary when the “artists” view (as well as the album cover view in itunes) does a fine job of filtering out non-Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band tracks from their Greatest Hits album. Rather than having a crapload of albums with 1 song on them, I use “Misc Singles” in the album field for songs that aren’t part of a complete album. So for some artists I might have a few albums and then a Misc Singles album with 1 or more random songs from that artist. Others just have a Misc Singles album. Now when I go into cover flow, since it’s organized by artist, I’d expect to see a “Misc Singles” album for each artist that has songs using that album name, containing just those songs. This is the case in the “artist” view. Instead, I get a bunch of Misc Singles albums, but each one contains all the Misc Singles songs from all the artists. It’s stupid retarded and makes me think that I might have to start doing “ Misc Singles” (but that’s going to make that 5 character non-scrolling album title in the “now playing” screen useless… don’t get me started on that).
Cover flow (as well as the “album” view) also doesn’t make use of the album artist when the album has the “compilation” tag set. Instead, it uses “Various Artists”. I’m sure that’s fine most of the time, but there are exceptions, and it’d be just as easy to use the album artist (which I’m pretty sure itunes does). It’d also be much better if these albums were sorted by the album name when the album artist is empty. Say I have the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. “Various Artists” is fine for the album artist (although I wish they’d get that from my album artist tags rather than automatically assigning it), but it’d be a lot easier to find if it were sorted with “Pulp Fiction Soundtrack” instead of at the very end of the cover flow, where all the compilations are. I guess you could argue that if you just go straight to where the compilations start (which can take for freakin’ ever), it’s then sorted by the album title, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find. That’s true, but it’s just less intuitive. If someone who has never used cover flow jumped in and said “I want to play something off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack”, they’d probably go looking in the P’s. Then maybe they’d try the S’s (for “soundtrack”). Or maybe they’d try the letter of the song’s artist if they knew that. Eventually they might look at the very end, but they’d probably have to ask me where it is first.
Another huge thing missing is a way to jump to the next letter. I might be mistaken, but on my ipod classic, I don’t think a big letter pops up when I frantically circle my thumb around the click wheel as fast as I can like it does when in the artist, album, or song views. It would be helpful if it did, or, even better, if the left and right buttons just let me jump to the next letter.
November 23rd, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Couldn’t agree more with the blog. I don’t use cover flow on my iPod, nor in iTunes, nor in Finder for all the reasons described. Why, when you can drill down through genres, albums, etc. much faster? The real shame is that they brought Cover Flow into Finder where it’s even less useful. Why don’t they simply include a Finder view that shows folders in a left pane and the files contained within on the right? (This is one area where Windows Explorer has the right idea…simple, logical, organized).