Magnatune now automatically detects retina display devices (i.e., iPad, HD Android, and 4k monitors) and swaps in album art and artist photos at twice the resolution in those cases.
I find the difference to be dramatic, especially with thumbnails of album art, with the text now suddenly being legible.
As indicated in another blog post, retina images are sent to you in WebP format, if you're running a browser compatible with that image format. In that case, retina images are actually 25% smaller than their jpeg non-retina equivalents!
If you're curious as how how this all looks, and you have a non-retina display, try looking at these two images:
-john
Wonderful! And will the larger images also be embedded in the downloadable music files?
Posted by: Karl Ove Hufthammer | December 02, 2014 at 10:02 AM
re: Karl - the larger images have always been available as separate files inside each album's download page. The reason we don't include them in the in the zip of the album is that there doesn't seem to be any consensus on what image size is "best" and what format people want (PNG/JPG/PDF)
However, all the formats that support embedded cover images in the audio file itself (ie, mp3, flac, aac, ogg) all include cover art at, I believe, 300x300 pixels (which is fairly high for a thumbnail)
-john
Posted by: John Buckman | December 02, 2014 at 11:23 AM
I would definitely prefer images to not be in the music downloadable files (embedded is ok)
If I want the cover art as a separate file, there is a very convenient and (more importantly) predictable link to download artwork.
Posted by: Ty | December 15, 2014 at 06:23 PM