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Since Apple Music and others are starting to make animated album covers for select albums, are there any plans to include compatibility for displaying these as the album art?

[eve]

Since Apple Music and others are starting to make animated album covers for select albums, are there any plans to include compatibility for displaying these as the album art?

That's pretty cool. I doubt they'll be supported though.

I actually find Apple a *really* good source for their prebuilt parallax posters and art assets for film / television. Very cool stuff.
I wonder what the format is? The parallax stuff is essentially a zip file with PNGs + json data that describes where the elements should be laid out.

Back in the day when I used iTunes (we're talking 15+ years ago now) they had a super cool thing with like interactive album liner notes? Just HTML and art assets with a bit of js but it was kinda clever, don't think it went anywhere  really.

[AlreadyFree]

That's interesting. I don't know anything about Apple's movie posters but I'll have to look into that. The animated album covers are essentially a looping MP4 video file, a format that MC already can read so it wouldn't seem too difficult to implement.

Displaying a large library with dozens or hundreds of animated album covers would consume a lot of memory though so it would probably be necessary to only activate the animation when the cursor is hovering over the album thumbnail or when Now Playing cover art display view is active.

[eve]

That's interesting. I don't know anything about Apple's movie posters but I'll have to look into that. The animated album covers are essentially a looping MP4 video file, a format that MC already can read so it wouldn't seem too difficult to implement.

Displaying a large library with dozens or hundreds of animated album covers would consume a lot of memory though so it would probably be necessary to only activate the animation when the cursor is hovering over the album thumbnail or when Now Playing cover art display view is active.

Okay very cool. So you're not going to get JRiver to implement the metadata scraping side of things for sure. Apple has a number of api routes that you can work out to get the art assets for something. That should get you started (I don't know if any of them contain the MP4 you're looking for though). For video at least (seemed to be similar for audio), you'll need a UMC for the desired item which is a unique ID.

[AlreadyFree]

Okay very cool. So you're not going to get JRiver to implement the metadata scraping side of things for sure. Apple has a number of api routes that you can work out to get the art assets for something. That should get you started (I don't know if any of them contain the MP4 you're looking for though). For video at least (seemed to be similar for audio), you'll need a UMC for the desired item which is a unique ID.

I'm sure MC isn't going to implement metadata scraping from Apple Music. I was just wondering if there are any plans to implement displaying of animated album covers in general, regardless of source.

[eve]

I'm sure MC isn't going to implement metadata scraping from Apple Music. I was just wondering if there are any plans to implement displaying of animated album covers in general, regardless of source.

Doubtful but would be cool.

A long-shot +1 from me.

The problem with the content itself is scale, essentially only companies like Apple have the resources, man hour wise, to 'create' these, I just don't know how much will be out there. Automation / "AI" can only get you so far right now. Starting simple does work though, I have a vague proof of concept that builds parallax posters for films. Given a poster with text, the textless version of that and a transparent logo, it tries to figure out where the primary text is on the poster, and uses that to position the transparent logo. Simple stuff but hugely useful. They definitely put money into some stuff, for example they have complementary colors defined for most art assets (they call them JOE colors? No idea what that's about) and at least based upon my little look into them, they're not just derived from a simple kmeans, which was my initial premise (you'll just take each image and pick out the top x colors). 

You could have a look at some of the 'create video with subtle motion' from images concepts out there. I'd honestly be kinda curious even if there are occasionally janky results.