My main gripe about CoverFlow has been that, on my 1800+ album iTunes Library, I had maybe 10% of album with cover art. Then came iTunes I-don't-remember-which-number and it could grabd covert arts from the iTS, but that still made for only about 50% of my Library. And CoverFlow is ugly and pretty useless with "blank" cover art.
So I went and started looking for a tool to allow me to add the missing artworks. I started using Corripio, which is pretty neat, allowing you to batch search through your library and grab covers off the iTunes Music Store, Coveralia, Walmart, and Buy.com for artwork that is no less than 500x500 in resolution (and it uses plugins).
My main gripe was that there is no way to transfer the covers that you already grabbed from the iTS and which are stored outside of the ID3 tags, in a special folder, so it has to redownload all the artworks. But I must say that Corripio is free.
Then I found CoverScout and decided to have a go at it. So this is going to be a mini-review of CoverScout, and not a full-on shootout of MP3 cover arts tools.
The CoverScout interface is, at the same time, simple and a bit clumsy. On the top you have a search field, some icons (come on guys, you can do better... ask the guy who did your website and other apps to redo the CoverScout GUI).
When you launch CoverScout, it loads your iTunes Library XML file, and provides you with a list of artists and albums. Each row shows an icon that indicates whether your album has full or partial iTunes cover art, ID3 cover art or a missing cover.
The first thing you want to do if, like me, you want your tracks to carry the cover art in the ID3 tag, is to use the "Copy iTunes Artwork" tool, which will grab all the covers from the iTS which are stored externally by iTunes and copy them over to the ID3 tags.
To look for a cover, simply select an album or track, and click on the Amazon button in the toolbar (note that you can choose which Amazon site to use, so it's quite handy for your German rock or French pop collection). CoverScout then searches and returns you the images it found on Amazon in the bottom of the window. To add a cover to your MP3s, simply double-click it. The Amazon search is a bit picky, so you might want to edit the search fields to remove things like "(Disc1)" or "Vol.5". OK, nothing new in the world of covert art grabbers. You can launch multiple searches at the same time, and they will appear in a side drawer, showing you the number of artworks found for each album.
But the real strength of CoverScout lies in the "Google" button. If your Amazon search doesn't return anything, hit that button and it launches a Google Image search in a dialogue sheet. You get a complete web page with Google search results (there's a URL field, so you can type any other URL you want). Browse through the results until you find the artwork you want, then right-click on the image and click "Apply Cover". That's it. Pretty neat. OK, usually it doesn't find 500x500 pixels artworks, but hey, better than nothing.
OK, and now for some complaining. There are two main issues. The first is speed: with 26000+ tracks, copying the iTS artworks takes a good couple hours, and reloading the iTunes Library takes even longer. And reloading the Library comes from my second gripe: stability. I don't know if it is related to the size of my Library, but I got several crashes of the app while doing multiple searches and cover additions at the same time. And when the app crashes, when you reload it it "looses" the status of many albums, so you need to reload the Library, which takes ages. After the third crash, I decided to do it the smooth way and went on not doing too many things at once, and it worked fine.
Conclusion: if you have lots of rather obscure albums, which are unlikely to be on the iTS or on major vendors like Amazon or Walmart, then CoverScout is your tool, thanks to the Google search integration. It has a couple other neat features, but is slightly buggy (which might be only a problem with huge libraries). You can try it out as a demo version and buy it for $19.95. This is going to be your friend when you put your dirty hands on an iPhone and want to show-off with CoverFlow on its shiny touchscreen.
