on returning to Synergy

After some time away, I am happy to be making use of it again, but here's some things that have occurred to me.

Floater needs fixing for Spaces in Leopard (see other thread).

I'd like better control of what is displayed in the floater. In particular I'd like Track x of y, maybe even the disc info included, but that really would need a way to only show it when there is any disc info. IOW, if there is only 1 disc and so those TAGS are empty, just show track info. The use of symbols to create your own data strings as used in many MP3 encoders for file name creation would be great.

Also a progress display would be nice. Possible?

Album Artwork is a thorny issue in iTunes at the moment. If it cannot be downloaded from the iTMS, there is no way to add it manually in the same way. All you can do is embed it into the track file which normally means a duplicate copy for every track on the album, an unwanted waste of space if you need to cram it all onto an iPod.

However, I have found that if you copy the image into a single file, iTunes will cleverly associate that artwork with every track of that album. This works pretty seamlessly in iTunes and also on the Apple TV, although the iPod still has a slight issue with this. Also it sort of works in Synergy. I put that artwork in the FIRST track of the album and Synergy happily displays that image in the floater. But, the neat thing is that it will also display that image for the rest of the tracks on the album, just as you want. But the problem arises when a different track is played first. In which case, Synergy grabs the artwork from the Internet and stores that in the usual place and any locally embedded artwork is then ignored.

Would it not be possible for Synergy to 'look ahead', if artwork is missing from the currently playing track and see if it exists on any other track from that album and if so, use that and not download any other unnecessary artwork.

Alternatively, if the above is tricky, download when it's missing, but subsequently, if any track of that album is found to contain artwork, use that instead and DELETE the stuff that was previously downloaded because it is now redundant as the local artwork can be used now it's been found.

Otherwise, it gets tricky keeping track of where the artwork is coming from and this can be important as you may think you have it, but then it doesn't make it down to the iPod because of course iTunes knows nothing about any artwork downloaded by Synergy. I'd suggest a simple pref to 'not download missing artwork' would be handy so at least you'd get control over what was going on.

I guess the floater window display is what it's all about for me.