“Curator ($17.99) is the ultimate tool for managing the artwork in your iTunes music collection. It can add album artwork to your music, so the artwork is displayed in iTunes.”
I have always been frustrated ever since Cover Flow first arrived on the scene as my ‘collection’ is primarily made up of albums that I have collected over the years. I have huge gaps in the album cover art in iTunes as most of my music isn’t in the iTunes Store.
Curator has very few preferences to set up. You can select Amazon and/or iTunes for the search for album covers, and you can select your preferred country from UK, USA, Canada, Japan, Germany or France. You can determine which Playlists you want included in the search, and that is about it.
Curator lets you manage your artwork collection album by album. Green and red status indicators let you know which albums are missing artwork. Curator is flexible: you can get the artwork for a single album, for all the albums by an artist, or for all albums with missing artwork. Simply double-click to download artwork into Curator, and then double-click again to copy artwork to iTunes.
Depending how larg your iTunes library is, and how many album covers you have missing, it can take a while to find missing art work but once it has you can bulk copy easily to the iTunes library. Again this take time, but as it is very much a ‘one off’ task to find the missing art work initially this isn’t an ongoing problem. Once the art work is added to iTunes there are options to copy the art work to an iPod, and use it in the Finder. My library now has significantly more art work than before. The custom search feature picked up a few more, but I still have some gaps which isn’t really the ‘fault’ of Curator, but does leave a little frustrated still with the cover art feature in iTunes.
All in all a fun, easy to use and useful application.
Press Release
Curator is the solution for people who like to micro-manage their artwork collection, or have obscure albums with hard-to-find covers. Curator is unique in letting you manage artwork in your library on an album-by-album basis, so you can download as much or as little artwork as you want. Indicators show you at a glance which albums have missing artwork.
Curator can even find artwork for unusual albums by looking them up on Amazon.com, the largest collection of music on the internet. Curator also helps you find artwork for foreign titles by searching all of Amazon.com’s international sites.
Curator can handle special editions and multiple artwork for one album. It can show you when it finds several answers and lets you choose the one you like best.
Curator lets you take full advantage of Cover Flow, Front Row, and the Apple TV keeping your artwork collection complete. Curator is also designed to add artwork directly to your iPod, so you can see artwork on your iPod display while your music plays.
Curator is a universal application, and requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later. It is available in English, French, German, Japanese, Italian and Dutch.