Forums

I agree, nice app, but not nice enough for me to pay $40 for it on its own, or even $20 given its annoying, anti-consumer registration system.

And, I am not impressed with the SongGenie co-install.

There approach is one of:

"Our customers are not our friends, they are at best a source of money, at worst criminals. Rather than build their trust with a good user experience, we are going to assume the worst, and do our best to get them to spend their money with us before they figure out what we are up to."

That approach made me abandon more than a few software developers for alternatives, even if the features weren't there.

Just sayin..

OK, so the licensing stuff sucks. But once I get past it and use Cover Scout I notice that when it applies cover art to MP3 files it converts the ID3 tags from version 2 to version 1. No way I'm going to let it do that.

Agreed, agreed, agreed on all points made thus far.

Absence of developer input in these discussions is disappointing (but not surprising).  They certainly would be gauging user response here but not responding themselves as it seems clear their customer care is severely lacking.

The only response I noticed in any thread from them was the same canned message bout how their activation servers are now working.

How does that affect the song? Also according to wikipedia id3 version 2 and 1 are completely unrelated so how and why would it do that?

Well when it goes down to v1 , it loses any extra v2 specific tags you may have saved.

Why would it be using v1 instead of v2 anyway? I noticed that SongGenie does this as well.

This is silly, because iTunes uses v2. When it tries to read my v1 information, it often gets incorrect or incomplete data - both SongGenie and CoverScout are finding incomplete data where I know and can see that the tags have given the files proper track names, artists and even album artwork. And if it's converting my tags back to v1, that's atrocious. I don't really want to lose that data.

And SongGenie's inability to detect album artists and try to rename compilations to have all the same artist had caused me to dump the program entirely... not that I was planning to buy the forcibly-installed application.

Founder of GoodSemester and ultra-webmaster of Zelda Universe and Zelda Wiki. I also have a blog that sometimes has ice cream.

I'm not in the least bit interested in this app, just to make that clear. However I really dislike how equinux is acting and the problems surrounding this application. So far we've had the horrible registration, the fact that they are installing SongGenie without the users consent and now the info that they are converting to an older method — I'm assuming without clearly stating that either.

As others have stated, I would rather have equinux's part of the sale go to charity instead of this developer. But I'm totally aware that won't happen and that the only thing you can do is to unsubscribe equinux from the e-mail list.

Another thing that bothers me is that iSale, from the same developer, was part of MH3 which makes it plausible that they will continue to be a part of MH...

Think Purple.

I agree, I would like to hear from Equinux.  Because of the posts and reviews from my fellow heisters, I don't plan on enduring, what appears to be, a huge pain in the a$$.

And please, fellow heisters don't hold Mac Heist responsible for a vendor's registration methods. Equinux was part of MH3 with their iSale app and I don't recall this many issues with registration.

:D MacHeist 1 Club :D

Registration process went without problems for me, maybe I tried it after the server problems were fixed.
However, the app is ok but not great.
- It does not find covers for all of my albums, well that could happen because of my musical taste, but it did not find covers that I myself had found with Google image search. On the other hand, it found a few higher res covers that I had not found.
- The equinox account is not nice
- Installation of SongGenie, all of a sudden, without clearly notifying me about this, I consider as "not done"
- UI design is nice. Quite intuitive

I thought this might be interesting but I can't let Song Genie anywhere near my iTunes library because I can't have the meta data messed with.

Equinux bring the Microsoft approach to the Mac. Great.

with best regards,
Karn.

The Optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears this is true.

Lol, reading this thread I think I will never install this crap even if they give it to me for free.

macheist rulez!

I let it run once, it didn't find any new covers, so out it goes. I just hope I remember to stay clear of equinux in the future.

DropBox Referral: 2.25GB free backup space

It's a bloody good program. It works. It finds stuff I haven't ever found.
Activation was flawless for me.
The things I hate are
- I had to give them some personal info that they don't need to know
- it phones home before you use it
- it installs song genie without me asking for it.
So I just gave them an obviously fake address, I'll use it once or twice till my library is up to date, and then I'll delete both it and song genie.
pity i have paid for this though.

Rotting mushroom, by popular request.
"And those of little faith chose orange, and Jebediah told them: "Let green be chosen and God's will be done. For green to God is more pleasing than either violet or blue."
-  Jonah 3:12-14

I have to say thanks for the heads up that it changes it from V2 to V1 that would have been a pain in the rear to say the least.  Why sell an app designed to work with itunes that does not even match up to itunes id3 tags. So glad I just did not run it on all my music!  Time to uninstall that monster!

By the way:
How about a reaction from the MacHeist staff? How could they have allowed this? They run a multimillion dollar business and every single year stuff like this happens, and every single year everybody just blames the developers.
However, we are not dealing with the developers here, but with MacHeist. And MacHeist deals with the developers. If the MAcHeist staff doesn't know how to draft a contract then that's just mind-bogglingly stupid. They should have clauses about licensing procedures, auto-installation of related programs, etc.
In the case of Song Genie, I understand that this gets installed with every copy of CoverScout, not just the MacHeist ones. So the MacHeist staff must, or should have been aware of it.
However, now that the forum is on fire, they wisely keep silent, they let Equnux take all the flak and pretend not to have anything to do with it.
MacHeist, take your responsibility! You have two choices: a) either you think the customers are right in this case and this is no proper way of doing business, in which case you should come out and tell us that you're talking to the Equinux people to get this sorted. b) you think that Equinux has all the right to do this (or have even explicitly allowed them to do this), in which case our "disappointment' should be directed toward you people as well. You get a huge portion of the pie here, and, well, personally I think that just your purdy website design alone isn't enough to justify that. Your silence means you're pleading ignorance, but sorry, that's just not good enough.

Rotting mushroom, by popular request.
"And those of little faith chose orange, and Jebediah told them: "Let green be chosen and God's will be done. For green to God is more pleasing than either violet or blue."
-  Jonah 3:12-14

I've just removed them both.... thank God I didn't run it on all my iTune collection.....

Been typing info into data for months as I listened to music, would hate to lose it all.

▛▞▞▟ Proud Member of the BLUE Team™ ▙▚▚▜
Use my DROPBOX link and we both get an extra 250mb free!
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTYxNTMzNDk

so... this ID3 ID1, how is it effecting me now that over half my library has used this app?
Didnt see any difference, didnt even see the term ID3 or ID1 in info.

Yeah, typically you think of compatibility with Mac... but anyway

Azenis, that's why:

White-Horse:CoverScout 3 lasombra$ du -h -d 1
471M    ./Covers
1.2G    ./iTunes Covers
1.7G    .
White-Horse:CoverScout 3 lasombra$

I used it for about 30min to fix about 5 to 6 album arts and that's how much disk space it used.
Not cool.

--
Your swollen pride assumes respect

Run an installer instead of drag and drop? Make some stupid ID just for your dumb little company and remember yet another username/password?  Idiots.

Is just deleting the coverscout and song-genie apps enough to uninstall this completely or did it dump any other stuff on my computer?

Good thing I got AppZapper from a previous heist. Bye-Bye CoverScout.

But Macheist does not offer a bill.

Read my response to your "The Front" thread, in short, its your responsibility as a citizen to refrain from participating in events outside your country's jurisdiction that would be illegal for you to do so.

Coverscout is neat, but I don't want to spend all that time clicking through each album. What I WANT is it to have an automation mode! Click the button and it goes to town, and gets the covers. Even if it doesnt get them all right, it's better than me spending countless hours doing something this program can do on it's own. Anyone have a script or anything to automate this mother?

"CoverScout can only show iTunes artwork if your iTunes media folder is organized
by iTunes or the library is on the internal harddrive."

#fail

Make sure you check the Library > Application Support folder when you delete it -- it had nearly 200 MB of cached artwork etc.

Any suggestions for an alternative?

But wait, there's more - it also dumped a 21MB file in Library > Caches

Very disappointed in the Coverscout app so far. I could forgive Songgenie being installed and the extended registration/data gouging exercise if the program actually worked.

I keep my music on an external drive and even though I've set the preferences up and the software is reading my library it isn't updating a single cover despite numerous attempts and different configurations with iTunes open or not open. A complete waste of my time and money.

Where is the developer during all these bad experiences. This is starting to tarnish Macheist's good name.

The software is meant to do just ONE thing. It can't even manage that.

Is anyone else noticing this?  I went into the iTunes folder and noticed that CoverScout isn't applying the cover art to some of my music.  This isn't happening to every album, only about 15% but it's still kinda weird.  I'm not too worried about it because iTunes and my Droid still recognize that those songs have cover art, but for some reason Finder isn't showing the art.

This might be a Finder problem for all I know, but still kinda weird.

http://i46.tinypic.com/f0xem1.jpg

Tune Up.  I've been eyeing that app for a while, but just haven't picked it up.  It finds cover art AND fixes songs.  No need to buy 2 apps.  Unlike CoverScout and SongGenie you can actually try it out before you buy, I think you get 100 free song fixes and 50 cover arts before you need to buy it.  $20 for a year or $30 for life.

http://www.tuneupmedia.com/

I have not tried it yet.. But from what i have heard i don't think i will.

MacHeist rules

Wow that's amazing - Tune Up found title & album info. from all these random Beatles bootlegs that my dad had downloaded from USENET groups like 10 years ago!  (e.g. Missing Lennon Tapes Vol. 4).  I am really impressed - I though that stuff was just going to linger untagged in my music library forever.

So far, despite the apparent issues mentioned with Tags, I havent ran into or seen any issues with them.

The app seems to work relatively well, and while it does seem to clog and need restarting after a few searches, other than that the interface and operation seems to be fine.

Fun to play with, though I wish it would stop searching when I go to another song, or I see that it found way to much for a general search...

I will add that it does add extra files as derickfay pointed out, and I deleted them... however Im sure its cached so that if you choose an alternative pic later its already loaded the search for you to quickly access...

... an option would be to allow user to turn this feature off.

Yes, a bit disappointed to find an extra app that you need and though it was loaded for me, I would rather it work if it was auto downloaded... maybe next update it will be.

As for registration, luckily I had registered for isale, other than that, yes I hate their registration process.

Peace

dAlen

Wow; I consider myself warned.  Bit-bucket-ward that goes; thankfully it wasn't why I bought this nanoBundle.

Good to know crapware is making its way onto the Mac; it must mean commercial success is right around the corner!

The best way to install CoverScout is by using Pacifist to just install coverscout3.pkg

Works every time

Two wrongs don't make a right.
But two rights do make an airplane

I'm still happy with the bundle but I have to say: Equinux is probably the Devil.

First things first: EquinuxID
I don't know about you but I don't sign up for stuff willingly. Unless you're desperate for internet points or whatever I just don't see the point of having a separate account for every blog and website. And now I have to get an account for an application? Seriously?

I get that it might be easier to manage users when you have forced them into your system but how about thinking about the users for once?

The price:
I got this application from the bundle so I can't really complain about the $40 price tag, but hey, this is turning into a rant so why not? There are a lot of people saying that if you want even one of the applications you can consider the rest freebies. This isn't really true, is it? When I buy an application I see it as a win-win scenario, I get an application I want, the developer get the money they want and they can hopefully continue to support their application and new ventures.

I don't doubt that bundles are great for developers, but giving money to someone who is doing something evil, that's bad, and Equinux is doing something evil. And c'mon: $40 for a piece of software with very limited use, polished, fine, but as a developer you have to consider the other options users have, some of them are far cheaper and maybe even superior.

The bloatware:
So after forcing myself through the registration I started using the application, it worked OK, couldn't find some of the covers of non-American artists but that's fine. I did have a few tracks without album information and I hoped I could add it in the application as I knew the name of the album myself. Nope, can't do that, an angry note told me that I should try and look for it using SongGenie. Fair enough. Oh wait, it opened a separate application? I didn't install that did I?

Huh? That's odd, let's see if I have SongGenie in my applications folder. It is. Oh, I guess COVERSCOUT INSTALLED NEW SOFTWARE I DIDN'T ASK FOR. That's not very nice. In fact, isn't that a REALLY BIG ISSUE? This is a Mac application, not some strange software I got as an email attachement from a Nigerian prince.

Speaking of SongGenie:
The set of features SongGenie offers should really be standard features for CoverScout. It should be standard features for any application trying to fix anything regarding your music.

And so, this rant comes to an end. Bundles are great, even if I don't use every application it's usually a fair deal, but this feels a bit like nullifying the charity as I have now supported the Devil, Equinux that is.

Equinux is probably the Devil?

You obviously never dealt with yearly AutoCad licenses...

Heh, Autodesk. [The company who is now the monopoly in 3D apps having bought every main 3D app out there.
Max, Maya, Softimage - Maya after an independent investor bought it from Alias and then turned around and sold it to Autodesk... nothing like going through loopholes as to avoid anti-competition laws]

But anyway... you do bring up a point.

Peace

dAlen

Yeah, ouch. All of my music is on an external drive (using a mac mini).

TuneUp is an alternative. It's a little sluggish (hybrid web-app) but finds album artwork and corrects tags (also displays concert, youtube, other web info in relation to currently playing song).

Results have been hit or miss for me using TuneUp (which seems to be the norm for these kinds of apps) so I go album by album or individual songs to be safe.

(somewhat offtopic but I've had good results with iClip Lyrics as an FYI)

With regards to artwork-finding alternatives, if you are willing to replace iTunes with Songbird, there are plugins to retrieve album art from Amazon and so on.  It can be a little buggy and hit or miss, but when I used Songbird it definitely picked up plenty of cover art that iTunes couldn't find.  It's not an ideal option, but an option nonetheless.

[ Twitter ]

Well, appZapper to the rescue!

Really this bundle is getting 50-50 on quality… let's see how Conceited Software moves along. Really hoping for them to pull it through.

▛▞▞▟ Proud Member of the BLUE Team™ ▙▚▚▜

My referal link: http://www.macheist.com/bundle/u/52012/
At the moment: 0 out of 2

Coverscout = Uninstall.  After running Coverscout, it came up with hundreds of albums which it said didn't have covers (but they did) and it updated very slowly.

Anybody else having problems with it crashing? I've been using it for maybe 10 minutes and had about that many crashes so far.

or Oracle.

:D MacHeist 1 Club :D

gah, wish I read this before I installed.

I have no wish to sign up for some damn Equinux ID just to register this thing. Time to try to uninstall it.

Fail App.

Come on, everybody knows that hell has more than one chief demon.

DropBox Referral: 2.25GB free backup space

Once I saw I had to sign up to register an app I already had a registration code for, and saw that the installer dumped an unannounced app in my Applications folder, it was uninstalled immediately. Really shoddy behaviour on the part of the developers, guaranteed to bring them nothing but ill will from users.

I know I am one more among hundreds, but...
THE REGISTRATION PROCESS IS INFURIATING.

I feel like the disgust by this app may hinder the sale of this nanobundle. or maybe not.

This is really disappointing. They've really screwed the pooch with this one.

Macheist should be their showcase - they're selling CoverScout for a discount, and it should be to promote their other apps like SongGenie. Well, here's a tale of two apps.

One is RipIt. It's simple and straight-forward. I downloaded it from the MacHeist website, and registered it with my Macheist code. When I entered my code, they gave me a promotional 25% off code for any of their other products. So, of course I go to their website and found a little program called "Ringtones" - a ringtone creator. It's simple and has a nice interface and I bought it almost without thinking about it.

The other is CoverScout. I mounted the dmg and, lo and behold, it has a package installer. Hmm...I don't really like package installers - for what CoverScout does, there should be no need for a package installer at all, unless it wants to do something underhanded. It turns out that it does - it wants to install SongGenie, an app I *haven't* paid for. So I grab CoverScout out of the package installer with Pacifist. Next, I find out that I have to register with their website even to use CoverScout - and that they want me to give them my street address! AND, CoverScout is going to phone home every time I use it to ask whether it's still ok for me to use the software I bought and paid for?

Well, I probably won't be buying anything else from equinux.

That said, the registration process for CoverScout seems to have worked alright for me. But I don't think they've really put their best foot forward.