CoverScout & Sonos

September 15th, 2008 chris

I’ve been working on some home automation stuff lately, including building out my music system with Sonos. One of the things I’ve noticed recently is how few of my album covers are showing up in the Sonos controller. it turns out Apple changed the way they store album art back in iTunes 7, and is now incompatible with where Sonos expects to find it. Sonos looks for album art either as a tag within the music file itself, or in a file called folder.jpg in each album folder. Apple probably had good reasons for changing the location of the artwork, such as efficiency of disk space and bandwidth, but that still leaves Sonos users with a less graphically interesting screen.

Well, it turns out there’s a product from Equinux called CoverScout that will help solve this problem. It runs through your library, filling in album art using the old tag within the file mechanism. Then it allows you to find other missing album art using Amazon or Google Images. It seems to work pretty well, and is a big timesaver. There might be other solutions out there, but for $19, this was worth it for me.

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