CoverSutra has been around for a long time. Over it’s several revisions, it’s seen some new features, and a whole lot of bug fixes. With all the revisions it’s gone through, it’s got to be one of the least-buggy applications I have ever used.
Find out why.
When you first open CoverSutra, you see artwork on your desktop and an icon in your dock. You have the option of disabling each of these. On the desktop, you see a CD case (or vinyl one) along with some artist info. When you double click on this, you see the main window of CoverSutra.
You have several toolbar buttons here. You’ve got your standard stop/start controls as well as shuffle, play in order, volume controls, and a scrubber. If you wish, you can also tell CoverSutra to play music from a playlist in your iTunes library.
CoverSutra allows you to also scrobble to Last.fm with now playing notifications. It also enables you to control your music with keyboard shortcuts. It’s incredibly useful for controlling iTunes outside of the iTunes application.
There are several areas where CoverSutra shines, one of them being in its search field. Beautifully designed (by Laurent Baumann), CoverSutra’s search is also blazingly fast. I’ve found it to be more reliable, more accurate, and in genral way faster than that of Bowtie or Ecoute.
Another amazing graphical feature of CoverSutra is its now playing bar.
You can also choose to configure now playing notifications via Growl. I can’t stand to lose the amazing design here, so I keep notifications to CoverSutra.
CoverSutra includes 3 default themes for you to see your music on your desktop. These include Vinyl, Modern Case, and CD Case. Each one of these is attractive, but after a while I got a little tired of them and switched to the pixels modification for CoverSutra.
While CoverSutra only lets you see 3 themes at a time, you can change the themes by modifying the resources of the application. Even better than themes, though, is that when you enter exposé, CoverSutra keeps the art on the desktop.
CoverSutra is a beautiful controller for iTunes. Its feature set is quite complete, but I felt like the lack of easy theming could be improved. The design is beautiful and so is the functionality: with Last.fm scrobbling, desktop cover art, and even a dock icon to see what’s currently playing. It’s the perfect workflow enhancer. Chances are it will be free tomorrow (to celebrate its birthday). Pick it up for $20 at Sophiestication software.
