AAUG Reviews

by Dave Enders ,AAUG Member

Now that I have an Apple Tv and and iPod Touch I have started to use the Coverflow feature introduced by Apple a few iTunes versions back more frequently than I have in the past. When you make a purchase form the iTunes store the artwork is included. But what about if you have your own cds ? You can use the get Album Artwork feature but that doesn’t always do it and sometimes the artwork is incorrect after all we are dealing with a computer here.

So the folks over at equinux have brought us CoverScout. I had a chance to meet Christian Rüb , PR Manager, for equinux at Macworld. He demonstrated the ease of using CoverScout. Knowing that I had a lot of music needing artwork , I requested a copy for review CoverScout. CoverScout has many features that can be reviewed here.

I started by having iTunes check for artwork for me. It did a decent job or so I thought out 924 covers , it could not find 151. As I started to randomly scroll through my music library I found that iTunes had applied some incorrect covers. So I fired up CoverScout and went to work.

It starts by reading your iTunes library in and provides feedback on whether there are incomplete covers , missing covers and iTunes covers. I dabbled for a while before I wanted to know what the green check marks , green squares etc meant to me. I referred to the information provided by the Help menu and was very pleased with the content and organization. I now immediately knew what I was looking at , perhaps I should have RTM first.

You find artwork by using either the Amazon store or Google search. I configured CoverScout so that a double click check for the desired artwork from the Amazon US store, you can also configure to check Google Images by default. I have some music purchased in Canada , so I switched to the Canadian store for those searches. I would like to see there be a search priority that tells CoverScout to check the US store then CDN store etc. My library had some artwork that was not what I wanted to be displayed. See the AC/DC artwork for Back in Black. and the desired artwork found on Amazon. Amazon searches return artwork for your review and final selection. You can select a preference that allows for default selection of artwork if only one match is found, album matches name or only one cover is found and album matches name. You should be aware there is still a possibility of ending up with the wrong artwork but the risk is minimized. I found that searching the Amazon stores to not be as accurate as it should be. I was able to perform my own searches on both the Amazon US and CDn site and fins the artwork I was looking to find. I experimented a bit with the searching and discovered that “Neil Young Weld Disk 1″ , which is how iTunes imported the CD, would not return a result but changed the search for “Neil Young Weld” would return the desired result. I tried this on other albums with similar results. I believe the search string passed to Amazon needs to be revised to provide a wider search. The Google images searches proved to be very wide and almost always returning the artwork in the first page of search results.

If I couldn’t coax a result from Google Images or Amazon but could find it using Safari for example , you can drag and drop the image easily into CoverScout.

iTunes since version 7 stores the artwork separately from the audio track. CoverScout provides the option to store the artwork into the audio file. This is useful if you are using a device other than an iPod family of music players for your playback.

Once you have artwork in CoverScout, you can edit it by scaling , rotating and cropping. CoverScout also supports the built in iSight camera if the artwork you are searching for is now where to be found on the web. I found this to be an undesirable option as there was too much reflection on my iMac’s glossy screen.

As I added covers into CoverScout , I checked in iTunes and the operation is dynamic in nature. The new or revised artwork immedialtely appeared in iTunes.

I like the interface of CoverScout and the visual feedback it provides to the user. I found it very easy to use. The documentation answers the “what if” questions you may have and is concise and accurate.

If you keep up with the missing covers in your iTunes libary , the time spent using CoverScout will be minimized and your music experience enhanced.

Pricing for CoverScout is $19.95 for a single license, $29.95 for three computers and $49.95 for 5 computers. The price for the single license is a bit high in my opinion, I would like to see it priced around $14.95.

In conclusion, I recommend it and give it 4 Moose.

by Gary Miller, AAUG Member

A great part of Apple’s new Leopard OS ( 10.5 )is Mail’s ability to use templates for stationery. But in using this well designed new feature, I wondered how either I would create or find more choices, and almost immediately Equinux announced it’s Stationery Pack with over 100 templates, WOW.

To start out, this is a downloadable product from the Equinux website or Apple stores, or Apple.com, or worldwide resellers listed on their website. Once you register, pay, you get a download code/license that allows one computer to use the software. The install went easy, and it comes with a manual accessible their help menu, and FAQ, plus email tech support. The company is headquartered in Munich, Germany, and has an engineering office in San Mateo, California, near Silicon Valley and Apple. I was assisted by their press and marketing person, Christian, and their tech support staff, who quickly responded to all my questions. I had wondered if one could create templates from templates, for correspondence, once I had dropped in a logo or personal photos, easy to do with their drag/drog designs, but the limitations are Apple’s Mail, so a good way is to save as a draft what you create.

Quickly I found that people receiving my emails were asking where I got all these new templates for photos, for birthdays, business, you name it, all easy to decide on because of the keyword search feature they included in Stationery Pack. Once you launch the application, you see all the choices, then clicking on a template, it comes forth in a bigger version that i could see better, then if you want another choice, click on that one, and it comes forth to replace the first one, then if you want to use that one, click on it, and it launches Mail, and a new mail ready for filing in sender, subject, and message. (more…)