In MM5 I really like that you can now get large artwork appearing in the main window when you click on Playing in the media tree. Nice job!
It took me a while to discover this, and also that by right clicking on it that I can configure it. I love that you can chose to go full screen, decide whether you want lyrics, etc.
I was getting a little nauseated with the artwork scrolling around, but found that that you can turn off the animation. Whew!
However, I was surprised that you only had two options for the artwork:
1) blur the background
2) darken the background
What happened to just display the original artwork that the artist intended, and have it fit the available screen space?
Blurred just doesn't work for me, but I suppose it would be good if you wanted to overlay the lyrics onto the background.
Darken background is OK, and seems like it might be good for low resolution artwork. But to me, with all the dots it looks quite ugly compared to higher resolution artwork. But the bigger problem is that since it not fit to screen space, a lot of stuff is cut off. A lot of album artwork has things like artist name, album name, and they are off from the center of the artwork so they truncated and aren't shown.
I added links to show what I mean with a couple of albums. First one has Darken Background and then I added a screen shot of what they might look like if the artwork was just the artwork taken from the .mp3 tag and expanded to fit the available space. (I just clicked on the artwork window in the right playing area, and then dragged and expanded the artwork window that came up to the main section of the screen.
See the examples here:
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=9ADEBEA6D ... A6D9A424D2
You can see that with Darken background, not only is the image really grainy, but a lot of the info about the album is cut off (Like album name). This happens quite frequently.
I don't think I have particularly exotic artwork tags. I think most of my artwork now is about 500x500 pixels. But I know that there are some "artwork connoisseurs" who are meticulous with their artwork and use super high resolution images. I think they would barf if they saw the pix-elated darken artwork option!
I realize that when it comes to aesthetics, everyone is going to have difference preferences. But this seems like original artwork would be the default option... Then some people might want it want it blurred, some darkened and pix-elated, some moving, etc.
Thanks for your consideration
In MM5 I really like that you can now get large artwork appearing in the main window when you click on Playing in the media tree. Nice job!
It took me a while to discover this, and also that by right clicking on it that I can configure it. I love that you can chose to go full screen, decide whether you want lyrics, etc.
I was getting a little nauseated with the artwork scrolling around, but found that that you can turn off the animation. Whew!
However, I was surprised that you only had two options for the artwork:
1) blur the background
2) darken the background
What happened to just display the original artwork that the artist intended, and have it fit the available screen space?
Blurred just doesn't work for me, but I suppose it would be good if you wanted to overlay the lyrics onto the background.
Darken background is OK, and seems like it might be good for low resolution artwork. But to me, with all the dots it looks quite ugly compared to higher resolution artwork. But the bigger problem is that since it not fit to screen space, a lot of stuff is cut off. A lot of album artwork has things like artist name, album name, and they are off from the center of the artwork so they truncated and aren't shown.
I added links to show what I mean with a couple of albums. First one has Darken Background and then I added a screen shot of what they might look like if the artwork was just the artwork taken from the .mp3 tag and expanded to fit the available space. (I just clicked on the artwork window in the right playing area, and then dragged and expanded the artwork window that came up to the main section of the screen.
See the examples here:
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=9ADEBEA6D9A424D2%21364431&cid=9ADEBEA6D9A424D2
You can see that with Darken background, not only is the image really grainy, but a lot of the info about the album is cut off (Like album name). This happens quite frequently.
I don't think I have particularly exotic artwork tags. I think most of my artwork now is about 500x500 pixels. But I know that there are some "artwork connoisseurs" who are meticulous with their artwork and use super high resolution images. I think they would barf if they saw the pix-elated darken artwork option!
I realize that when it comes to aesthetics, everyone is going to have difference preferences. But this seems like original artwork would be the default option... Then some people might want it want it blurred, some darkened and pix-elated, some moving, etc.
Thanks for your consideration