The other day I wrote this meaningless post about iTunes 7.0’s worst error message ever: iTunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer. Judging from the number of people hitting that page, I’m not alone. So what the deal?
I did some research. Here’s a topic at the Apple iTunes user forum that’s pretty detailed and it suggested a couple of possibilities.
Possibility 1: QuickTime is out of date. Nope: I have 7.1.3 installed and verified.
Possibility 2: Video Driver is out of date. Yep: I’m on a Dell Inspiron 600M with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000. The driver was from 2004 and there was a download at Dell for one from 12/2005. I updated to that and the problem was solved.
Update Possibility 3: Brill points out that you may also need to turn on your video card’s hardware accelleration.
After possibility 2, I can now browse by album cover.
Hey, you: I bet you need a website designed or maintained.
14 comments ↓
hey so how did u get that download for the new driver?
I went to Dell’s support site, entered my system tag and selected video drivers. If you don’t have a Dell (and good for you if you don’t
), you’ll need to find out what your video card is, maker and model, and search the mfg’s site for an update.
hi there!
In my case all I need to do it was change in Display Properties, color quality from Medium (16 bit) to Highest (32 bit) and it is all now working perfectly!
Cheers, Lukasz
You might also get this error message if for some reason you’ve turned off graphics accelleration on your video card and forgotten to turn it back on.
yeah, for my dell all i needed was to switch the resolution to “highest” an it worked fine
Excellent post. THe problem was my video driver.
It just happened to me. The problem was, I had SecondLife viewer running.
Closing both and starting iTunes first solved it for me.
Thanks – the hardware acceleration was my problem – I NEVER would have thought of that without your help!
“iTunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer”
For some USB2 video capture HW applications, I use a lower number of colors for my display, thereby reducing CPU overhead. So when I’m in this 16-bit display mode, the iTunes software “cover flow view” comes up with this goofy message. I use a utility named Multi-Res. By switching to full 24-bit @ 800×600, voila, iTunes that is still running in the background suddenly displays the cover art image–and the goofy error message disappears.
Note that Apple should fix this–it is “a bug” not to use an ActiveX display control that can handle display of an image in all display modes and resolutions.
I also noticed that if the cover art is not a given aspect ratio or even number of scan lines or something that the image is decoded wrongly in this bigger image ActiveX display control whereas in the smaller corner image ActiveX display control the image is always displayed properly even if the former message about “unable to browse” is displayed by the larger ActiveX image display control.
If two different programmers were involved, probably the good one has been fired, and the more senior one who wrote the bad code with the bug in it still is working on the project. Uck!
So the solution is that Apple fix their bugs and hire software developers who admit that they make mistakes, but they debug their mistakes when clearly identified as such. If the fired programmer was right all along, they should re-hire that guy and fire the one who is actually to blame for shaming apple with this appalling bug.
Unfortunately, all offered remedies have not cleared this error for me.
Acceleration is on, 32bit, and newest driver for an ATI 9800 Radeon graphics card.
I have the same problem with the same card, Radeon 9800. It worked before I update the driver. Now it doesn’t.
Hello all!
If this is of any help whatsoever, I as well have solved this issue… I have a Dell D620, and I recently updated the NVIDIA drivers. In doing so, I became unable to play any video trailers from apple’s website. Upon further research, I realized that I had to disable “Directdraw” from DirectX (dxdiag.exe), which worked like a champ. However, upon doing so, I seemed to need Directdraw in order to view the Album covers… Wooondeful…. So either I corrupt my quicktime files on websites, or I corrupt the CD album covers….
One other possibility…
I got the error message when I opened iTunes while Google Earth was also running. I closed them both, restarted iTunes and it’s fine.
I guess I just didn’t have enough memory (or whatever) for both.
I tried to download new drivers but I couldn’t. And I did try to change settings in the Advanced area lol. But none of it worked. If you have the same problem as I had just REINSTALL ITUNES and it should work fine.
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