To my surrpise, Cover Stream updated to 2.0 on the 9th of May. I first heard about this application from TUAW from its 1.4 update, but TUAW seemed to have neglected its 2.0 release. The price of Cover Stream went up from USD$14.95  in March to €14.95(coversutra is also marked at this price) now for a lifetime update. Who knows, maybe it will be the next Coverflow which was acquired by Apple and integrated into their Operating System. Cover Stream is a hifty software that allows you to breeze through your iTunes library with the gorgeous coverflow interface without bringing to front the iTunes software itself. 

How does it compare to software of its kind, like Coversutra?

Memory usage

On my 101gb iTunes library loaded with 5272 songs with a larger portion of them in apple lossless format, Cover Stream uses 215.96mb of real memory and 499.61mb of virtual memory. It might seem a lot, but it still response quite quickly, despite some lacks when showing the currently playing album artwork after pressing the next track button. 

With Coversutra, it runs on a 40.58mb of real memory when idling and 369.58mb of virtual memory. Though I have not used more accurate measures to gauge the hit these 2 applications have on the hardware, it is pretty much self-evident upon a trial run. Coversutra recently updated to 2.1.2, before that it never crashed or lagged, given its small footprint and updates are more directed towards the user-interface rather than functionality. 

GUI

While the new application icon of Cover Stream looks much better than in the 1.4 version. I found one from macthemes2.net that might fit better as a replacement in terms of integrity on the menubar icon design.In Cover Stream 2.0, users see a more sleek GUI overall. The album artwork on the desktop looks very much like the other application only with  a more blurred display of album art. Not sure if this has to do with the fact that the album art is shown in profile and recedes into the screen itself a bit thus causing a distortion on the album art.

The animated transition between various clicks such as song selection, info display and song change notification lack a little bit but give the application a more advanced look compared to its last revision. Users can now choose to keep the browser window floating on top. One glitch is that after entering the preference pane with the browser floating, it would be gone once you close the preference pane. It will not come up again unless you uncheck and check the “Float on top” option in the menubar. 

Functionality

With the newly integrated search function, users can now see what they are typing in the Cover Stream window. And search result pops up almost instantly. One very frustrating aspect is that if you were shuffling songs in your library and for some reason you wanted to listen to one particular track, you will be stuck in that album after the track finished playing. Cover Stream would keep shuffling songs from that album only instead of your entire library. To solve this you have to go back to iTunes and delete the Cover Stream playlist, then go back to Music and select any track. The developer explained it has something to do with iTunes’ architecture rather than Cover Stream itself. 

In iTunes we could see the current song playing by pressing Command+L. For Cover Stream, The browser window does not always correspond to the currently playing song. And pressing command L does not seem to do the trick anymore than in the previous version. 

If you are not always importing songs to your iTunes library, it might be wise to turn off sync with iTunes at startup, this way it seem to take up less system resources. One other possibility is to uncheck “show icon in Dock”. 

Conclusion

This is a rather brief review. But it is obvious that Cover Stream is a great app for Coverflow oriented control of iTunes, as the developer intended in the first place. Though it still requires a bit of work to iron out the glitches, it is making great progress in challenging the place of better known album art display programs. It certainly is a keeper!