Version
2.3.8
Publisher
Equinux
The Good
Finds album art in multiple locations
Audits album art status of iTunes library
Adds album art as ID3 tag
Best for libraries with a lot of albums
The Bad
No auto-addition of album art for entire library
The Price
US$19.95
For iPod and iPhone users, iTunes album art is more important than ever before. While it used to be a nice perk to have the cover art for the albums in your iTunes library, now that Apple is making such extensive use of CoverFlow in the interface of the iPod, iPhone, and even the Mac OS itself, having all that great-looking cover art is practically a necessity.
Flipping through CoverFlow when your albums lack art just isn’t much fun. Songs bought from iTunes, AmazonMP3, and Napster’s MP3 store have album art automatically added to them, but songs from eMusic, ripped from some CDs, or added from other sources are often missing album art.
To address this, Apple built an automatic iTunes art importer into their jukebox software, but sometimes it misses art (for instance, in preparation for this review, I ran the tool. It retrieved covers for only about half of my library) or gets the wrong cover.
You can add cover art manually – using search engines or online stores like Amazon to find the art. If you’ve got a large library, though, that can be a lot of work. Enter CoverScout.
CoverScout is an iTunes art importer program designed to help you easily find and add album art to your iTunes library on the Mac.
When you launch CoverScout, it scans your iTunes library and determines which albums have art, which have art added by iTunes as a separate file, and which have album art included as part of the album’s ID3 tags – the method preferred by some (including the developers of CoverScout) as being more efficient and less likely to cause problems in the event of data loss.
With this list, you can sort albums by type and add art to albums that don’t have it or update those that don’t use ID3 tags to store the CD covers.
CoverScout scans both Amazon.com and Google Images to find the cover art for your albums. In most cases these sources will serve you fine. For particularly obscure albums, you’ll need to search elsewhere or use an iSight camera to take a photo – a neat feature offered by CoverScout.
Settings are available to allow CoverScout to automatically add album art in some cases. One downside of the program is that while you can automatically add album art to a single album, there’s no way to set the program running and have it add art to all albums the way iTunes does. While this is done to allow the user to choose which art they want (some graphics are larger or higher quality than others, some albums have more than one cover), the need to click every album individually is time-consuming and means that those who want a quick fix won’t find it here.
This is CoverScout’s biggest drawback, though its interface can also be a little confusing at first, since the icons denoting which albums have no art, iTunes art, or ID3 art aren’t entirely intuitive. Once you get used to it, though, it’s easy enough to use.
The biggest question I’m left with after having used CoverScout for a while is: is its $20 price a good value? Adding album art to iTunes – even as ID3 tags – isn’t hugely time-consuming. CoverScout certainly saves some time, but how much?
The answer may lay in the size of your iTunes library. If you’ve got a small library – say 200 albums or less – you may want to add art using iTunes and supplement it manually. A little time with Google Images and copying and pasting will set you up well.
But, if like me you’ve got close to 1,000 albums, an iTunes art importer like CoverScout will save you hours of searching, copying, and pasting. And all that time saved is worth much more than $20.
