But what other aspects would need to be considered to ensure the text always looked good on the chosen background color? To ensure colorful text I also added a bit of code to make sure the color used for the text had a minimum saturation level. At this point things were really starting to look good. So the next thing I did to improve the results were to make sure the text colors were distinct enough from each other to be considered a separate color. If we relied only on color frequency you’d get variants of the same color for the different types of text (EG: primary, secondary, detail). Again, the first thing I tried was simple color counting, this provides surprisingly good results but iTunes does better. I didn’t add this functionality as it was outside the scope of my simple demo application.Īfter the background color was determined, the next step is to find contrasting text colors. So lets say you have a solid white border around the artwork picture, iTunes will remove the border and base its theming colors off the remaining interior content. After doing some more analysis I saw that iTunes also looks for borders around the artwork. Once I started filtering black and white backgrounds my results started to get a bit closer to iTunes. Of course you don’t want to replace black or white if those colors really are dominant, so I made sure that the fallback color was at least 30% as common as the default black or white. Doing this presents more interesting styles since seeing only black and white backgrounds would be a bit boring. I proceeded to add a bit of logic to add preference for colored backgrounds instead of just using black and white when those were the most prevalent colors. Doing a simple color count gives pretty good results, but looking at iTunes it was clear there was more to it than just that. This seemed easy enough, just use simple color frequency to determine the most prevalent color along the left hand side of the artwork. The first step in replicating iTunes theming is obvious: getting the background color used for the track listing. The result is an attractive display of textual information that seamlessly integrates with the album’s artwork.Īfter using iTunes for a day I wondered just how hard it would be to mimic this functionality - use a source image to create a themed image/text display. The headlining feature of this display is the new view style that visually matches the track listing to the album’s cover art. ITunes 11 is a radical departure from previous versions and nothing illustrates this more than the new album display mode.

Disable album artwork itunes 12