CoverScout 3 - iTune Album

[StoaVio]

CoverScout is an iTunes album artwork tool designed to enhance iTunes' capabilities..

It's much more than a simple artwork downloader, however, giving you editing and management options.

The application scans your music folder and looks for albums that lack a cover image and then scours websites such as Amazon, Google Images and Wal-Mart to see if one is available to download.

CoverScout helps you scour the Internet to find optimal examples of album art to suit your iTunes library. It integrates an editor and automatic workflow tools. You can custom-fit print templates and print out CD covers and inlays, as well.

[StoaVio]

New to the version 3 release is a new interface that works similarly to Apple's Cover Flow technology, which lets you more intuitively navigate your record collection by providing you with images of each album cover.

CoverScout lets you search sites including Amazon.com, Walmart.com and Google Image Search to come up with matches (you can add additional sources as necessary). Once you've found an image you're happy with, CoverScout lets you rotate, crop, scale and adjust colors. You can also use your iSight to image a rare album cover if you're a collector.

CoverScout 3 has a beautiful interface. It’s dark grey on black and uses, what else, Cover Flow to show what your library looks like. On the right side there is a list of all of your albums. The left portion is where you can see what your albums look like, or more likely, what a stack of giant musical notes looks like.

You can do a number of things if you select an album, but I’ll outline them in the order in which you’re likely to perform them. First, you’ll pick an album that needs fixing. Then CoverScout will scour the web—mainly Amazon and Google—and collect a number of choices that may represent your album. You can have them sorted by rating or pixel size. I prefer the pixel size.

You can resize, crop and adjust levels. You’d be surprised how much a simple crop followed by black and white level setting adjustments can do to improve the look of your album art. The crop is even semi-intelligent, cutting out what you obviously don’t need, though it often undershoots by about 1 pixel. In a few instances, I still found myself wanting to edit with a little more control to fix up a few images that didn’t have such great results from the net. But really, there are more features here than I ever could have expected. Give a man a fish and he’ll ask for chips I guess.

Besides the auto-crop undershoot issue, I really only have one issue with this application, and it’s quite a small one. I’d like there to be a find all button. After CoverScout scans your whole Library to find which albums have art and which don’t, you just get a list. It only searches the internet for albums you actually click on. I understand that it’s not always a good idea to search for 200+ albums at once, but when your library looks like Gary Busey, it would be nice to have a fetch all button.

[StoaVio]

The software can perform multiple search operations for album covers at the same time. Once the correct cover has been found the software automatically attaches it to the music file in your iTunes library. The covers will then be displayed in iTunes and also on your iPod. 
When you open CoverScout you’re presented with a display that will show your albums on the left, tracks on the right, and cover art on the bottom of the window. Your iTunes catalog will be imported automatically. Icons tell you whether an album has complete art, incomplete art or no art at all.

The toolbar is located at the top of the main window. It provides quick access to search sources and assignment functions. Another nice touch: the search field can be used to execute individual searches not based on your library data.

There are two drawers left of and below the main window. To open or close a drawer, click the appropriate drawer button at the bottom of the main window (to the left and the right of the library summary). The progress drawer displays the progress of active searches and provides a history of all searches you’ve conducted so far.

CoverScout is available immediately online and will be available as a boxed retail version in the near future. The cost is US$15.95 (for a limited time; normally its $19.95). A demo version is available at the equinux web site.

Macsimum rating: 7.5 out of 10.

CoverScout is Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.