iTunes is great at organizing and playing your music, but it isn't so hot at managing your album art and lyrics. Kavasoft's Curator fills that gap surprisingly well, and it manages song lyrics, too.

Curator is a stand-alone application for Mac OS X instead of an iTunes plug-in. Since the application works along side iTunes, instead of inside iTunes, the interface is free to focus on on album artwork - a feature that iTunes forsakes in favor of offering an interface that is better suiting to finding and listening to music.

Curator 1.0

Curator starts by importing your existing album art from iTunes. Once imported, it's much easier to see what art you already have thanks to Curator's list view with color coded artwork icons: Green means you have artwork, red means you don't.

If you are missing artwork, Curator will search Amazon and the iTunes Store. I found that to be an amazingly useful feature since iTunes searches for artwork only at the iTunes Store, and I have lots of music that isn't available there.

Curator did a pretty good job of finding the correct album art, but it occasionally had trouble with tracks that listed their genre, artist, or album as unknown. In those cases, Curator almost always chose the album cover from The Future Is Unknown... by Unknown Hinson. Not what I was looking for, but an interesting album cover none the less. Some other results, however, didn't seem to have anything in common with the album I had selected. That didn't happen very often, so I couldn't find any kind of pattern.

This cover showed up when album data includes "unknown."

For those hard to find album covers, Curator also includes a custom search through Google that lists everything it can find that matches your search criteria. The results list includes thumbnail artwork, so you can breeze through the list and find what you are looking for quickly.

Curator's custom search.

Curator holds the artwork it finds in its own database and uploads images back into iTunes only when you tell it. I liked that because it let me play around with different art samples without messing up the art I already had in iTunes. And if you want to bypass iTunes, Curator will upload album art directly to your iPod.

Sorting through albums isn't always limited to iTunes, and for those users that like rooting through their music folder, Curator can build custom album cover art icons for each album folder. The average user probably won't ever use this feature, but hard core audiophiles that are into building their own digital albums will flip for this.

The Bottom Line
Even though Curator occasionally finds incorrect artwork, it does a great job overall of helping you manage your album art.

Curator offers a much better interface for managing album art and lyrics than iTunes, and it does a good job of finding missing album art for you. Since it isn't limited to searching the iTunes Store database, you aren't limited to finding art only for tracks that Apple sells, and you can perform more in depth art searches on the Web without jumping into your favorite Web browser - and that can be a real time saver.