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[underweight]

Hi, first I have to admit that I'm one very happy customer. I'm using MC11 and I wanna create a poster (the ones you actually hang on your wall) in the largest size I can afford with the best quality possible. So far I managed only to create a great looking A4 sized print. I got 2990 albums all with cover art in MC and use a custom smartlist with album thumbnails (43x43 pixels) and no spacing. I change the screen resolution to the highest possible (2048x1536) on my system, list the album thumbnails nearly fullscreen (the title bar is still present), make a screen shot, scroll down the list, make another screen shot, merge and crop the screen shots together in photoshop and have a picture of a size around 1978x2795 pixels with a matrix of 46x65 covers, which is good enough quality to print out on a A4 color laser printer. If I choose larger thumbnail sizes the aspect ratio of the resulting picture is nowhere near anything you could print and still would look good. So here is my question: anyone got any idea of a way I could get a higher resolution picture to print on paper larger than A4? Putting together e.g. four screenshots (one left top, one left bottom, one right top, one right bottom) is no option, cause then the sorting would be out of order. Is there maybe a little tool that lets you run MC on a virtual desktop in fullscreen with a size of say 6400x4800? My graphic card drivers don't offer an option like this, are there any graphic card drivers that do so? Anyway, I'm pretty pleased of what I reached so far and framed the A4-print (did I mention that you can see 2990 tiny little covers on it? ) and it's hanging on my wall. You can still recognize the covers 
Thanx for any reply and thanx for such a great customizable program,
underweight
P.S.: I haven't found a way to use the COMMENT field in visualisation studio as a text field yet. COMMENT or [COMMENT] don't work  ?
P.P.S.: Is there maybe a way within MC to export a simple text list of all albums in the format like ARTIST - ALBUM (YEAR), where each album is listed only once?

[kaiynne]

This is a really cool idea.  There is no way that I know of displaying such high resolutions, because your monitor also has to support it, although as I write this I am not sure that that is true.  I have never tried to take a screen shot when the monitor was out of sync, so it may be possible.  there is a way to force your graphics card to display a crazy resolution though, called powerstrip.  I am not sure that it goes that high but it does go very high for projectors and what not.

Which is another way you might try, displaying the cover art on a high quality projector on a high quality display and then taking a photo with a dslr in raw format.  I have to imagine that would come close to the quality you would need for an a4 or larger print. 

you may have a an oportunity if you set this system up and it works well, I certainly would be willing to send you my cover art folder, so you could make a high quality poster using those as well.  Obviously it would depend on the total cost and stuff but I know someone who this would make a great gift for.  I would have to think there are many people on this board as obsessed with their music as my wife who would also be interested in this.

There is no way to add your own custome fields for displying in the visualizations yet.  It is not as customizable as I would like to see it, but it wasn't a big priority this time around.  Maybe in MC 12.

you can get a list of all albums and artists (not sure about year) click on the bottom left pane and go to file properties then statistics and then artist album.  It will only display information for files in the current viewscheme, so if you have a view scheme for all of you music that is the one you want to be in.

[underweight]

Thanx for the quick and interesting reply. The last tip about the statistics field was very helpful. I can live with the lack of custom text fields in visualizations, but I'll continue on finding a solution to the 'high quality poster problem'. I already tried powerstrip, didn't work for me. It let me set up a custom driver for my monitor with tweaked maximum resolution, but my monitor stayed black. Haven't found out yet if you can make screen shots if the monitor is out of synch. The suggestion with the high quality projector on a high quality display is very smart, unfortunately all my money already went into my music. So if anyone is actually going to realize that, I'd be glad to send my cover art folder as well. But if I can find a solution on a software base I'll share my knowledge or can make you a print as well, kaiynne, if the shipping costs don't exceed the potential pleasure provided. I'm still hoping that one of those 'virtual desktop tools' got that feature.

[lee269]

Sounds a bit like you are talking about those images made out of lots of small ones that seemed to be popular a while back (I remember an image of Darth Vader with 'pixels' made out of stills from the films). Only without the overall image - just a grid of cover art.

I figured there must be a program that makes these. Photo Mosaics they're called apparently. Dunno about any total image size limitations with these, but maybe some of these will help?

[EDIT: the 2gether1 pro version will apparently go up to 8000 pixel width - its $279 though]

[underweight]

these mosaic programs got me addicted this is absolutely not what I had in mind but it's great fun