Why are the titles in cover art less albums all caps?
I’ve seen several people ask why we choose to use all caps for when we don’t have cover art to display for an album:
The answer is that this design allows for consistent character spacing, eliminates issues with ascenders and descenders and it reduces localization issues for some languages.
Comments(16)
At first glance it is distracting, difficult to read, and somewhat amatureish. Maybe it will grow on me.
As a somewhat-type-obsessed, long-time MCE user, I plead with you to reconsider…this is a really bad aesthetic decision. Forcing uppercase does not help with “consistent character spacing”, and is proven to impede readability. Microsoft needs to think more like Apple, and do the right thing rather than the easy thing.
I’d agree with Charles. And it looks nasty. And amateurish.
I’m not even sure I understand the excuses – how does it ‘allow for consistent character spacing’? It looks like it’s still in a proportional font, so what’s the difference?
And – ‘eliminates issues with ascenders and descenders’ – is this like the problem with descenders/ascenders we used to get on 8×9 dot matrix printers? Is this still the 80s and I imagined digital typography? (I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say this is a solved problem.)
And how does it ‘reduce localization issues for some languages’? Are you more likely to have accented letters etc in upper case than in mixed case?
I’m just asking because the entire excuse sounds like the sort of thing I’d raise my eyebrows at if a dev on my team came up with it, so I’m thinking I must be missing something.
What’s driving me crazy is all my music is on a Infrant NAS box. When I go to browse for music I get a constantly shifting image patchwork that constantly moves back and forth as I guess it is trying to recatalog the library each time it starts. Why can’t it cache the information and update it either in the background or ask me IF I want it updated. J River Media Center has an excellent thumbnail album library that is always up to date after the initial music search. If posting a picture is allowed I could try to upload a sample.
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Just get the dang cover art on all the albums! There is alway’s an image or something that could be used for cover art so it doesn’t really even matter if it’s in all caps or look’s pretty like how Apple would do it. Apple has frontrow and they don’t touch MCE yet….and probrably won’t…
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“this design allows for consistent character spacing, eliminates issues with ascenders and descenders and it reduces localization issues for some languages”
=
“we took the easy way out”
You know what would be nice? If no cover art is found, search online in the msn music database.
I’m having problems with long album names like “Foute CD Van Deckers En Ornelis Vol.1 Disc 1″, the name doesn’t scoll so i can’t see the disc nr.
I would like to see a “find artwork now” for albums that have none. Occassionally I see them update but for obvious titles I can’t find a way (short of going out to media player) to update the album art… Is this something that might be added?
Yeah it looks ugly.
I totaly agree with “Code” and “drmcghee”.
Cover Art online search on various databases is mandatory.
Just check My Movies Plugin http://www.mymovies.name for an exemple
Seriously reconsider this “feature”. Children are taught to read/write lower case first now and this is suppose to be a family product. Lets be family friendly.
I see the upper case “I” in Vista still looks the same as lower case “l”, looks really strange.