I recently bought an Apple TV so I can listen to all of my music through my stereo without fiddling with the iPod (and also to rent movies, but it won’t let me do that yet). It works okay as an mp3 player, but the absolute best part about it is the screensaver mode, which can be set up to randomly send all the album artwork from your music collection whizzing across your TV screen. This is the closest thing to sitting around and sorting through a random pile of actual physical CDs that I’ve found yet, and I am so mesmerized by the thing it is scary. Listening to your entire music collection on random play has always been one of the best things about the mp3 revolution, but you can only listen to one song at a time. With this you watch about twenty random albums a minute scroll by reminding you they exist. For an unrepentant music junkie like myself this is worse than crack. I can spend all day staring at it and finding more and more music I want to listen to. I’m sure someone else did it somewhere else first, and in retrospect it’s a really simple and obvious thing for an mp3 player to do, but I can’t get enough of it.
.idallas.com » Rhapsody on Tivo | 24-Jan-08 at 10:19 pm | Permalink
[...] through the cover art of albums you have in your Rhapsody library. It’s not as cool as the Apple TV screensaver, but it’s still a whole lot better than a black [...]
Ryan | 03-Jun-08 at 10:15 pm | Permalink
Great info — i can understand the mesmorization! Still, one concern I have is that I don’t ultimately want a bunch of stuff whizzing across the screen while I’m chilling in my living room with friends for a night and having conversation etc. To that end, is there a way to just make the screen go dark when you’re not using it to browse the itunes library? Can’t figure this out anywhere!
art | 08-Jun-08 at 2:48 am | Permalink
There is a Screensaver preference setting to use either the whizzing albums, random pictures from your iPhoto collection, or a black background with an occasional Apple logo.
I’ve actually found that having the albums whizzing by contributes to the conversation though if your friends have similar musical backgrounds! Then again, people don’t always want to hear me rambling on about music…
Ryan | 10-Jun-08 at 4:22 pm | Permalink
great info – thanks