I still collect LP’s. Why? A couple of reasons. One: I really like the sound of vinyl; there is something rich and magical about the sound. But just as important as the sound of Vinyl is the presentation that the format makes possible. The roughly 12×12 inches of ‘canvas’ makes the LP a great medium for visual art as well as music.

So it was with a lot of interest that I purchased my first iTunes LP album. No, iTunes did not go into the printing business or the vinyl business. But they brought the the fun of enjoying an LP to iTunes. And in this writers opinion, they did it in style.

Now with special marked boxes of Honeycomb cereal…I mean…with specially marked albums in the iTunes music store, the purchaser also get a special download. The . itlp file that came with Grateful Dead’s exceptional American Beauty album is about 190 MB in size. Now that’s a cereal box prize I can sink my teeth into. It’s listed along with the album tracks and opens in iTunes as album art mixed with multimedia goodness. While listening to the album you can peruse the content just like the good ol’ days. Even better, photos and lyrics aren’t the only thing the new ‘LP’ format has to offer. Music video’s, interviews, anything that the multimedia designer’s mind can imagine.

One more cool thing: by simply changing the extension on the file from .itlp to .zip you can look inside and access all the files that make up the presentation. Now that’s cool!

The LP, new or old, truly is an American Beauty.