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underCover - The Free iTunes Artwork Managment Tool

P

piquadrat

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 25, 2009
5
0
Hi,

have you ever wondered why it's so cumbersome to add custom cover artwork to iTunes, and why iTunes handles them differently than the artwork it gets from the iTMS? Have you ever asked yourself why you have to embed the cover artwork in every single track for iTunes to use it correctly?

Well, I asked myself these questions and I came to the conclusion that iTunes simply isn't up to the task. So I sat down a couple of weeks ago and started to develop a solution for this problem. Several sleepless nights later, I think I've got something that could not only be useful to me, but also to other artwork enthusiasts.

screenshot_linux.png


underCover is an artwork managment tool for iTunes. It intercepts artwork-related communication between iTunes and the iTunes Store and can serve custom artwork or artwork from Amazon and other webservices to iTunes.
Click to expand...

underCover is released as Open Source (MIT license) and is completely free. No nag screens, no adds, no spyware.

It works on Windows and OSX Leopard. Since I don't personally own a Mac, I couldn't test the application as much as I'd liked on OSX. But other than a harmless crash now and then, it should work quite happily on a Mac.

You can download it here: http://undercover.piquadrat.ch. Also, read the manual, it should answer most questions.

Please let me know what you think! Any features missing? Any annoying bugs? undercover@piquadrat.ch
 
Yeah, I discovered Orbicule's Undercover when writing this thread, a couple of threads down. I didn't find it when I originally searched for other applications with the name "undercover".

I don't think that there could be any trademark problem, since undercover is such a generic term. It's more a problem of confusing users, so I'm definitely thinking about renaming the application. Any ideas are welcome :)
 
Kind of like TuneUp. Seems like a good idea. If you can package it into a slick interface and beef up the features while keeping it free (or limiting it to so many fixes a month or something unless you buy the full version) I'd go for it.
 
Cool. Free. Does it work with 10.4 or it's 10.5 and above like most of the similar apps?

There is a well known OSX app called UnderCover
google: undercover mac

There are many album art finder / embedder apps available. Search Macupdate or versiontracker
 
@Consultant: the current bundle only runs on 10.5 as far as I know. But there are no technical barriers which would prevent it to run on 10.4, except that I don't own a Mac and it's already hard enough to test it on 10.5.

I tested most of the available album finder/embedder apps, but most of them write the image data directly into the MP3 file (as ID3 tag), which blows up the file sizes quite a bit. With underCover, iTunes handles artwork from Amazon or custom artwork exactly like the artwork it gets from the iTunes Store: it safes them (somewhat disguised) in your iTunes folder, once per album. That's the main difference between underCover and all the other apps I tested.

@Melrose: underCover will always remain free, if only because I can't afford to buy commercial licenses for some of the libraries I use (Qt and PyQt) :D. If you have feature suggestions, I'm happy to think about how to implement them :)

And yeah, I will almost certainly rename the application.
 
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