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02 January 2010
I, like most people now, am the owner of an iPod and I am very fussy when it comes to having the right album art displayed when a song is playing on my iPod. Sometimes assigning an album cover using iTunes is a task that comes with little success and extra frustration. This is where CoverScout is the ultimate tool. CoverScout, quite simply, is a tool for finding missing album covers in your music library. CoverScout uses the well-known CoverFlow interface and scans by default the music folder inside your home folder. Additional folders can be added for the software to scan.
Ease of use
Value for money
Price approx
$ 59 NZ
Software/Hardware Requirements
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
PowerPC G4 or higher
CD-ROM-Drive or software download
Internet connection
Available from
iRefresh.co.nz
Installation was very easy – all that was required was to drag the application off the supplied CD to the Applications folder on the local Mac. The software runs very quickly on Snow Leopard (with the Equinux website reporting that the software runs better in Snow Leopard than in any other previous version of Mac OSX) and a 15 megabyte software update was available and was downloaded. Product activation was also easy – all that was needed was to ender in a serial number that came with the software. An account was created when activating the product – this was a mandatory requirement.
The splash screen introduces the user to the different features of the software including album cover search, applying covers to albums, cover editing and cover printing. The option to not have this screen appear is available. Tutorial videos are also available.
The initial scan of my album library took a few minutes and did not slow the Mac down at all. The main window has Spotlight-style filtering if you are searching for a specific artist/album/song and the main window view can be customised to display all albums, albums with covers, albums with no covers and albums with incomplete covers. The window view can also be adjusted to display compilation albums only, display all albums including compilation albums and also not include compilation albums.
The software does rely heavily on properly completed ID3 tags within the MP3 files to differentiate between compilation albums and non-compilation albums. In addition, if you have a number of MP3 files that do not belong to any specific albums (such as songs in the root of your music folder) and do not have any ID3 tag information loaded into the file then CoverScout will not display these files.
Assigning covers to albums is very simple – all that is required is a double click on the album name in the right window pane. CoverScout then searches the Internet for appropriate album covers and displays a quality rating beneath each image. CoverScout searches for album images on Amazon.com (USA, Germany and France sites), Google Image and Walmart and preferences for cover searching can be changed within the software.
All that is left is to double click on a cover and CoverScout does the rest. The album cover is then saved as part of the ID3 tag information and the album is ready to be loaded into your iTunes library or directly onto your iPod.
CoverScout can also move album images out of iTunes to music files.
CoverScout also allows you to edit the album cover. The software offers tools such as rotating, zooming, cropping and scaling. If your Mac is equipped with a camera you can even take photos to use as album covers.
Another smart feature of this software is another tool called "SongGenie". If any untitled albums exist in your music library SongGenie will help fill in this missing information. SongGenie, however, comes as an unlicensed demo with CoverScout and functionality in this mode is limited.
In summary, CoverScout is easy to use and very smart. It certainly saves time when it comes to finding covers for your albums and it also assists with management of your album library by identifying where ID3 tags may not be properly completed. The cover searching functionality is fast and provides a good selection of covers to choose from even for the more obscure albums.
The only grumbles I have about this software are that it relies heavily on ID3 tag data being correct so some editing of this data may be required – CoverScout ignores MP3 files that do not have any ID3 tag information loaded. The ability to use local image files as album covers is also missing and the covers of some albums that may have already covers assigned to them may not display in CoverScout.
I definitely recommend this software to all Mac users who are serious about having tidy album libraries and having the correct album covers displayed when songs are playing.
Thanks to iRefresh.co.nz for providing a copy of CoverScout to review
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