Review: CoverScout a handy iTunes accessory
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 25, 2008 at 6:26am
If, like me, you have an extensive iTunes collection of music with several gaps in the album artwork despite iTunes’ attempts to find it, you’ll find CoverScout from equinux a very, very handy utility.
CoverScout is software that helps to find and apply album covers to your iTunes music library. It searches for appropriate covers using Google, Amazon, the iTunes Music Store library and other web sites. My library of over 3,000 songs had several “holes” in the album covers. Using CoverScout—after a quick tour of the PDF manual and using the software’s Google integration—I filed in all the holes in less than 10 minutes.
iTunes does a great job of finding the artwork from the iTunes Store, but is spotty in finding album covers from other sources, such as CDs (especially obscure ones). CoverScout deftly deals with this dilemma.
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.
The artwork inspector located at the bottom of the main window displays the current artwork for the track(s) selected above or lists artwork resulting from a search. Two different views are available. The multi-track view is used for search results or if more than one track (or a single album).
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. Searches with pre-selected covers appear in light blue while the currently selected search is shown in blue.
The lower part of the progress bar can be expanded to display the active assignments. The assignment list is hidden by default. To display the assignment list click and drag the little dot at the bottom of the progress drawer
Covers can be stored temporarily in a clipboard for later use. To store search results or existing covers in the clipboard, select a cover from the artwork inspector, then drag and drop the cover onto the clipboard. To apply covers from the clipboard drag and drop a cover onto an album or track. (the clipboard will be emptied when you quit CoverScout.)
CoverScout will let you remove art from an album and apply new art, if you wish. And you’re not limited to entire albums. You can also apply art to individual tracks of an album. Once you choose the artwork you want, CoverScout quickly—and I mean quickly—applies it to the selected tracks. Applying artwork to disc one of the Eagles’ Long Road out of Eden took—maybe—two seconds.
You can select several albums and do a one-click album cover search. After you’ve chosen an album in each search you can quickly apply them all to your iTunes library. CoverScout can also automatically apply covers to your iTunes library.
You can also use an iSight camera to take photos and use them as artwork. For instance, if you’ve ripped a really obscure CD into iTunes and the album art can’t be found online, you can simply snap a photo of the album cover with an iSight, save it and use it in conjunction with CoverScout to apply it to tracks in iTunes. Finally, it’s compatible with the new iTunes Plus library format and is optimized for the latest iTunes release.
On my 24-inch aluminum iMac, the software was stable, quick and effective. I only have one major complaint: equinux requires you to activate the software. That involves signing up for an equinux account, then entering an activation code when you launch CoverScout. Want to use it on another Mac? You’ll have to de-activate CoverScout from one Mac and activate it on another. I guess this is designed to prevent software theft, which I understand. However, it’s an in-elegant, pain-in-the-butt process.
Which is disappointing, as, overall, CoverScout is elegant and extremely effective.
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.
The “Macsimum MWSF 2007 Coupon Book” is available for download. You can find it here and print it as a PDF. It has discounts, special offers and promotions.
jeffHarris Says:
$20 isn’t so much if it can save you a lot of time and effort to find cover art. It’s less than the cost of 2 CDs.
I’ve tried it and it works fairly well for mainstream recordings. The problem is with obscure music, older recordings, or if you have altered the info that iTunes from CCDB. Then it either returns erroneous artwork or nothing at all.
Me? I just scan CD covers as I rip them into iTunes. Sure it takes a little extra time, but I get it just right.
Posted on January 25, 2008
mauidj Says:
Why do people think they should get stuff for free?
This is a great little program that saves a lot of time and all for a lousy $16.
Hey guys if you don’t need or want it then fair enough but all the negative rants are such a waste of time!
BTW...who did the screen grab.....gotta love a Zappa fan.
Posted on January 26, 2008
jma Says:
What I do find unreasonable is the comment about this product being too expensive. I am a software developer and I can assure you that this program is not a hack, this is a very nicely designed, thought out and useful program that saves me lots of time. For starters it does search Amazon and Google and you are very likely to find your cover here (99% for me). Then you can embed the artwork in ALL the tracks of an album at once. Try to do this on a 5000+ albums collection, and try to do that manually or with Doug’s AppleScripts and you will see how much work you are saving yourself. BTW, Doug’s scripts are nice too, only they are usually aimed at atomic actions, not an entire workflow like this task requires. To be fair too, I do have some reservations about the performance of this program, and some nitpicky complains about the interface. But in this age when you spend $4 on a latte, do I think this product is expensive? Hell no, it is worth every penny to me, now I can truly enjoy the iTunes/iPhone Coverflow the way it was intended.
Posted on March 23, 2008
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
ArtOfWarfare Says:
Yet another small program that someone will stupidly try charging $20 for. Do people actually pay for these one purpose programs? I guess they must if people still charge for it. Seriously, I just don’t get it. The production cost for these programs are near $0 I’m sure (apart from buying the computer to program on… which I’m sure they bought for other reasons.) Donations really seem like the way they should go. You can use the program free of charge. When you fill like you’ve used it for long enough that you owe someone $5, you can donate them the $5 the program is actually worth.
Sorry about ranting somewhat off-topic. The program looks neat, the price just looks unreasonable (and I’ve already gone through my collection of 3975 songs and given them all album covers… took me about 2 hours… I would have been willing to pay $5 like I said to save me that time. But the price is too high and the program comes too late.)
Posted on January 25, 2008