Over the weekend I had a chance to play with Apple’s Front Row interface for iTunes to DJ Katherine’s birthday party. Overall I think it’s a pretty neat way to run music. I set her MacBook Pro on a bookshelf and turned off the screensaver so that you’d always been able to see the Front Row display, which meant people could look over and see a song name whenever they wanted, along with album art for most songs1.
Some observations:
- The “Now Playing” screen looks really nice. It’s a very good combination of an iPod screen and Keynote slides.
- It’s basically useless without the remote, if you can even activate it without one. Using the keyboard to navigate everything is cumbersome, so we need to not lose it.
- There needs to be a way to toggle right into iTunes from Front Row, and vice versa. As it is, you have to back all the way out to the desktop, and then click open iTunes to change your playlists. Fortunately the music does keep playing if you do that.
- On-the-fly DJ’ing isn’t really possible. You can’t move through songs quickly enough without a scroll wheel, and I’m not sure if it’ll create on-the-go playlists like an iPod will. This came up when the playlist I had made ran out of music. It would be nice to be able to click-and-hold on a song to append it to the current playlist, though that might be possible and I just didn’t try it.
- Playing music from other computers on the network is easy, but playlists don’t seem to sync as often as they maybe should. I started playing a playlist that was on my iMac, and a few times I wanted to pick a track to play right after the one playing right at that moment, so I’d drag the song up on the playlist, but Front Row would play a song from an earlier version of the list. It seems to cache one or two songs ahead before checking the source for more.
- At least for slideshows without music already assigned, you can start a song in music mode, then start a slideshow and have the music play overtop of the pictures. It works very nicely, but I’m not sure what it would do if you picked a slideshow that already has music attached.
I think using a computer as a jukebox or a slide projector in this way is basically exactly what Front Row was built for (though it’s funny that both are technologies we’ve had for decades). I don’t think I’ll use it for really anything else, and we don’t host parties that often at all. Down the road, though, there’s the idea that you could just use a Mac mini that would stay plugged into your TV and stereo all the time, and you’d play all your music, DVDs, and TV shows on it. That would depend on Apple expanding the list of shows available on the iTunes store to include basically everything, even daily shows like Oprah, soaps, game shows, and probably also have a portal to watch news streams as well.
- For songs that I haven’t downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, I’ve been using Amazon Album Art, a Dashboard Widget. Once installed and on your Dashboard, you just click on a song in iTunes, bring up your Dashboard, and click a button. It’ll search Amazon for the album art and bring it up, and then you can click a button to add it to iTunes. The approach works, but it feels odd to have to use another program to find artwork. Sure, the point of Dashboard is to be something you can bring up and dismiss as needed, but I tend to think of it as an extra layer used for quick reference, and not something interactive. That’s what the Services menu is for, but of course most people don’t know about it. Even better, Apple could add an option right in iTunes to search Amazon (or even iTunes) for art for any song without artwork. ↩