A DIFFERENT album cover question

This is certainly something that I would like to do, although I know it won't make it into the next release.

One of the problems with the Synergy development model is that when I started the project I had no idea of what it would become. Take a look at the change history, or better still, at release announcement for Synergy 0.1 (you'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page to see it).

What this basically means in terms of development is that the original design was very simple, and only ever intended to put three buttons in the menu bar. Soon, I added hot keys, tool-tips, the floater, album cover downloads, and many, many other features. It has all grown quite large and unwieldly.

And that is why I have started work on a separate product, Synergy Advance. It is just becoming too hard to add major features to Synergy because the original codebase was not set up with this in mind. So there is a call for a different, separate product, which can handle all of the things which are simply not practical to implement in the Synergy.

This new product is written from the ground up with a much more long-term, extensible framework in place so that I will be able to do things that I never dreamed of attempting with Synergy (although judging from the user requests I receive by email, there are certainly people out there who do dream these things).

I will continue to develop Synergy as an independent product (for example, trying to resolve these Amazon issues, releasing Panther compatibility updates, and adding minor features and tweaks). But there are some features (for example, automated lyric downloading, embedding and management) which require a separate product.

I have yet to decide on a pricing structure, but my aim is to ensure that both products are reasonably priced, so that users can choose to purchase a license for one or the other, or both, according to taste.

But to answer your question about whether this is the kind of thing that I will put in Synergy, the answer is that I would like to, but it really depends on how difficult the implementation turns out to be. It all stems from the fact that the original floater code was never intended to handle album covers as well, but it did and became horrendously complex, and then when Apple introduced album cover embedding in iTunes it made it more complex still.

In any case, Synergy Advance, which will also have album cover management features (which go far beyond anything in Synergy) will easily be able to handle the issue that you are currently facing.