CoverFlow: Browse Album Covers with Style

CoverFlow is a beautiful application that lets you browse your music collection by album cover. The interface is intentionally kept simple, allowing users to simply scroll through albums and make selections (that’s it). So what makes CoverFlow so great? The original “feelings” of holding a stack of CDs, thumbing through them to find the right one, inspecting the liner, reading the track list, are all imitated digitally (minus the liner and track list part as of this version) in the best implementation I’ve seen to date. The fullscreen view turns your machine into a bonafide jukebox.

CoverFlow makes a copy of your album art for fast retrieval. The FAQ & Tips page addresses more potential issues one might have, mostly around album browsing performance. If you have a recent Mac with a dedicated video card, you should be fine (scrolling speed should feel smooth), even for larger music collections. I’m running CoverFlow 1.990 on an iBook and am very pleased with the performance. My MP3 collection on this machine is not large however, so I would like to test this further by loading up my entire collection (but first I’ll need a bigger disk).

Browsing Nirvana (pun intended)

You can run CoverFlow in a windowed mode, or fullscreen mode. Fullscreen mode is truly impressive, effectively creating a modern jukebox. I’d like to run CoverFlow on my iBook or a Mac Mini, connect it to a large display, provide a wireless mouse, and let party guests make audio selections just as they would with a traditional jukebox.

CoverFlow retains useful audio navigation features like play/pause, backward/forward, and even provides a search. In the screenshot below, I started typing “Ra….” and it pulled up my Rage Against the Machine albums as I expected (using some ajax autocomplete functionality). The search feature scans genres, artists, and albums.

Searching for anything starting with "Ra…"

Where iTunes feels bloated and sluggish, CoverFlow is responsive and smooth. CoverFlow is a simple and intuitive interface to browse my music collection, with all but the most necessary audio navigation functions abstracted away. Since CoverFlow is running as a layer on top of iTunes, you can close it without interrupting your music. You can pop back into the application as necessary, or leave it running in the background.

This review is intentionally short for two reasons: one is that CoverFlow has very few features (from a user perspective) which I think is a good thing since the features are so well implemented, and secondly one must use the application to get a sense for how slick it is, so stop reading and go download it now!