CoverScout Gets Major Overhaul for New Release

One member of the "Trio of Album Artwork Utilities for iTunes" that I wrote about three weeks ago was CoverScout. Because there were some minor "misunderstandings" between this software and iTunes 8, I was expecting an update that would fix these issues, and that update came out last Friday. Little did I know, however, that the developers were working on a new major release of the software, as well!

CoverScout 3 was released last week, and among the new features are an expanded list of sources for cover art images, a built-in image editor, and support for printing jewel box covers. Most striking, though, is the completely revised user interface, whose most obvious change is a new all-black look. More important, though, is the application's vastly simplified layout.

CoverScout maintains its own list of your music, and after the initial import -- from any folder containing music files, not just your iTunes library -- the software displays all albums in a CoverFlow view and as a plain list. Four large buttons inside the CoverFlow view provide access to the software's core features: search, web search, image editing, and printing.

Applying cover art with CoverScout takes three steps: select one or more albums from the list -- whose width I wish was resizable but isn't --, select "Start Searches" to trigger multiple concurrent searches for all albums in the selection, and select a cover from the search results panel.

Each thumbnail in the results panel can list either the size of each image in pixels or as star ratings, which I found a bit confusing until I read the manual: these stars do not reflect ratings somehow, somewhere entered by humans, but are assigned by CoverScout based on the images' size. In other words, it does not reflect the images' quality as one might assume.

To gauge just that, however, CoverScout can display the selected image at full size in a separate preview window, which, by the way, works like an Inspector. Consequently, you can leave that window open while browsing for the best-quality image, and simply change the selection in the search results. Perfect!

To make adding album art even more efficient, CoverScout 3 has a feature named "Start Searches & Assign", which works just like "Start Searches" with the added convenience that it will automatically add the "best search result" to the respective album based on a number of criteria (see screenshot). In the search results panel, the image that CoverScout assigned to the respective album is indicated by a red frame, so it's easy to spot, and just as easy to change.

For some of the searches, the selection criteria did not work as intended, e.g., sometimes CoverScout would not assign the largest image, even though that was set as a selection criterium. I'm sure that this will be fixed in a bug-fix update, though.

If the standard search fails, resorting to Web Search may still find an image for the selected album, and the results view in this case is a full-featured, tabbed web browser with a Google search field thrown in for good measure. On the pages in that browser, CoverScout automatically detects images that seem to be suitable for cover art, and applying one of these images to an album just requires clicking on the "Apply to Selection" button that appears in the selected image.

Just like its predecessor, CoverScout is able to assign an image to just a sub-set of an album's tracks, which tracks you access by "flipping over" an album, just like on an iPod Touch or iPhone. What's more, the tracks in the list even have a Play button. I'm almost tempted to suggest that an "iTunes Front-End" mode be added to CoverScout, which mode, when enabled, would hide all the image-related features and show play controls and a volume slider instead, so that one could enjoy a more full-featured CoverFlow experience than that offered by iTunes.

CoverScout 3 adds a number of useful editing tools for optimizing images right within the software by rotating, straightening, cropping, scaling, adding a frame, and even adjusting the levels of an image. It's in this editor, that the developers have also placed the iSight capturing feature. Most users will probably be happy with the images just as they are downloaded from the 'Net, but if you do occasionally feel as though an image needs sprucing up, it's good to know that you don't have to resort to additional software for this.

Unfortunately, the redesign of CoverScout 3 has also claimed a victim, too. iTunes has two ways of storing album art: right inside the music files like CoverScout, or separately from those files in a dedicated database. The previous release of CoverScout supported both kinds and could even embed separately stored images inside music files. In CoverScout 3, those albums that do not have their album art embedded, simply appear as not having any cover art at all, so that, for the exact same album, you might see a cover in iTunes, but not in CoverScout, which is rather irritating. I would wish that this feature would be re-introduced into CoverScout, for the simple reason that the cover art provided by the iTunes Store tends to be at the higher end of the scale -- both in terms of size and image quality.

While I am not a fan of non-standard user interfaces, I absolutely love CoverScout's new look-and-feel. The developers have taken lots of design cues from iPhone/iPod Touch and iTunes, so that the application feels very familiar despite the non-standard appearance. The tidier layout makes for a smoother and more efficient workflow, and a few neat animations (that can even be slowed down by pressing the Shift key) make using CoverScout downright fun.

CoverScout 3 costs $39.95, and a demo version is available as a 23.1MB download. (Please note that the software requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.)