I love iTunes (and my massive music library); if my MBP is open, there’s a 98% chance that it’s got music coming out. Using it all day long like this, I wanted some hot keys for it.
Man oh man, did I find some. After trying a host of options – including Quicksilver – a friend recommended CoverSutra, from Sophiestication. I was a little hesitant, mostly because I was looking for freeware. (What can I say, I’m a poor grad student.) They swore it was the best thing going, however, so I gave it a try.
By the end of the ten-day trial period, I was sold. Now, though, I have a problem again. There’s eight days left on the MacHeist bundle, and only four on the demo of the new CoverSutra 2. Since CoverSutra 2 isn’t available outside of the bundle until the offer ends, I’m going to need something to tide me over while I wait: and hence, a review.
CoverSutra – both 1 and 2 – revolves around a nice set of features, with the upgrade to 2 having a few changes. I’ll do my best to note which features differ between the two, but this is mostly a review of version 2. At the heart of things, it’s an iTunes controller, with a customizable set of hotkeys (+up, left, and right in my setup) and a menu-bar accessible preference editor. It’s the nice little tweaks, however, that got me so hooked.
For starters, you’ve got all that nice album art that iTunes so carefully gathered from the iTunes Music Store for you, right? But if you’re controlling iTunes from hotkeys, you probably never see it. If you want it to, CoverSutra puts a nice album cover on your desktop. In CS1, this was a black-spined CD case; CS2 adds the ability to choose between three provided ‘skins’ – the old one, a clear, round-edged jewel case, and a vinyl sleeve. To the right, you can see which one I chose. You can also choose to have it display the track name, artist, and album title underneath. If you don’t have album art, it will instead display a ‘handwritten’ cover.
You can also hide this if you don’t want to clutter your desktop, or substitute a floating window that shows most of the same options and information as iTunes’ mini player, with the addition of the album art and a more attractive interface.

Head on up to the menubar and there’s some more goodies. The menubar icon got a redesign in CS2 from the old frisbee-like image to that heart; clicking on it now pulls up a Spotlight-like search box. This in turn has a clean HUD-type interface that lets you select not just the album but also the song to play.
CoverSutra can also handle your Last.fm submissions, if you use that website. While I had some problems with this in CS1 – and by ‘some problems’ I mean ‘it never worked at all’ – CS2 actually does this. (And I’d rather it did – while I like iScrobbler, one less thing running in my crowded menubar is always a bonus. Remember that screenshot of my Desktop Manager pager? All those boxes?)
In other nice features, it talks to Growl – you can have a popup notification each time the track changes – and works with the Apple remote. The memory footprint is tiny, even with the album art on the desktop option on.
All in all, this is an excellent little piece of shareware, well worth the $22USD price tag. CoverSutra 2 is Leopard-only, although CoverSutra 1 is still available for Tiger users.
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