Cover Flow

I love my digital music. But I miss the days of the beautifully designed album and CD covers, the concept first invented, I recently learned, back in 1938 by the graphic artist, Alex Steinweiss. Before then, albums came packaged in plain brown wrappers that were about as dull as the digital word titles you get in iTunes. According to an Amazon description, Steinweiss’s “simple idea revolutionized the record business and spawned an entire new field of illustration–album cover art––this is now inseparable from the product it announces.”

Well, maybe album covers are a thing of the past, but CD art covers are still alive and well, and  SteelSkies has put the beauty of CD art for Tiger users with its application called, Cover Flow. I’ve been running it since it came out, I believe, back September of last year. The design and technology is awesomely cool and you’ll simply relish browsing all the music art covers you have tucked away in iTunes.

Yesterday’s release of the newest version of Cover Flow includes full screen viewing, a few bug fixes, and some language locations. It’s still in beta stage and the author admits it might have problems on some computers. It’s worked okay for, though the Esc key did not close the full screen viewing when I tried it a couple of times. I clicked numerous buttons until it finally let go of my screen. But other than that, it works nicely. I pull it out from time to time when I long for the good old days. I would be nice if were an iTunes plug-in.

Also, by the way, Cover Flow does make copies of the artwork into it’s own application folder. But the files get compressed and take up less disk space.

It’s free/donationware download, so head over to steelskies.com and get you a copy. And if you’re a CD art cover aficionado and you like this application, you might want to also click over to the Flickr Cover Flow pool and check out what others are showing off in their music collection.