CoverSutra is an iTunes controller for Mac OS X. It’s been around a while now. Back in the days when iTunes controllers were all the rage. Yet it stood its ground and has become quite robust—becoming a lean, mean, controlling machine—and a solid edition to any modders desktop. Moreover, it provides users with three nicely designed themes. But sadly, it’s not very modder friendly, if, you know, you aren’t into the default themes. However, there are always ways around things, and modders are notorious for dissecting and deconstructing programs.

This guide will take a lot of the legwork out of modding CoverSutra. So let’s begin. First, open up the contents of the program (right click on the app in Finder) and navigate to the PlugIn folder, found inside of the Contents folder. There, you’ll see the three default themes. Choose the theme you find most disposable (I’ve chosen JewelBoxing—the modern CD box displayed on the left Album Cover dialog screen in the Preferences Pane).

In Finder, right click on the file and choose “Show Package Contents.” As you’ll see, there isn’t much to a theme. A handful of .tiffs and an Info.plist file. Open up the plist and you’ll see the code required to make the theme functional. If you have any experience in modding, you’ll feel right at home, as this stuff is actually quite rudimentary.

Let me give you a precis of the plist file. The lines you need to change are the values of the coverFrame keys. These tell CoverSutra how to position and size the cover being displayed. Leave all other strings alone, even the size key, which dictates the actual image size. As pictured to the left, you can make the cover any size you wish, provided it is ultimately constrained within the dimensions of the current theme (144×144 for example). You’ll notice that each theme as 3 difference cover sizes (Extra Small, Small, and Medium—I guess Sophie doesn’t like large? Anyway, I digress). Medium is the standard size and is the one I’ve modded successfully, and will be the one I use in my example.

First thing to do is create your overlay image. This will be the image that is pinned on top of the album cover art that CoverSutra will display when a song is played. As I said, you can make this image any size you wish, provided it does not exceed the dimensions found in the theme. Simply start with a 144×144 (for medium) sized canvas and go from there. Tiff files support transparency, so position the image however you wish.

Next, save the file using the same file name (in this case medium.tiff and emptyMedium.tiff, where the latter is the image that will be displayed when your song does not contain cover art). Now it’s time to adjust the cover art to be displayed properly within your new image. These values are found under the coverFrame key (bolded values) of the plist file:

CoverSutraAlbumCaseMedium
    caseImage
    medium.tiff
    coverFrame
    {{15, 24}, {100, 100}}
    size
    {144, 144}
    emptyCaseImage
    emptyMedium.tiff

The first set of values (in pixels) represent the left and bottom offsets, respectively. The second set of values represent the actual vertical and horizontal cover dimensions. To promote clarity, let’s go through an example.

In the code above, the cover art is positioned 14 pixels from the left, 24 pixels from the bottom (represented by the yellow areas). The other two values represent the full dimensions of the cover art, as represented by the four red corners. Essentially, here the cover is 100×100 pixels and it is offset from the left 14 pixels, and from the bottom 24 pixels.

Once you have the correct values, simply save the changes to the plist file and then copy your modded theme back to the PlugIns folder found within the program. I’ve personally ported over my Fcuk Vinyl BowTie theme, which you can download here (as you can see, I’ve replaced the JewelBoxing theme). It is of note that I have only modified the medium size that is typically pinned to the desktop. Once you overwrite the default theme of the same name, open up the CoverSutra Preference Pane and you’ll see it listed in the Album Cover tab.

There really isn’t all that much to it, but hopefully I saved you the 20 minutes of legwork it took me to mod my first cover art. Now go and mod all your BowTie themes and bring them over to CoverSutra. But bear in mind, you will only be able to replace the default themes, and that means running no more than 3 themes at a time.

Modder 4 Life.