With iTunes 7 came the new album art view, a list with album art and the songs assigned to that album next to it. But long before iTunes 7, Sophia Teutschler was working on an app to do something very similar, browse by album art. Of course there was already CoverFlow, but Sophia wanted an app that you could pick individual songs from. So she started working on Coversutra

Note: This app is currently in beta and is not released yet. This is simply giving a sneak peek.

When you first open Coversutra it fetches all the album art from your iTunes library. It indexes everything so it’s ready to go in almost no time.

The standard layout is your album art on top with the song view on the bottom. Of course, this is all adjustable. If you want only albums showing, you can do that too.

One very cool feature is that the album art’s size is adjustable, similar to iPhoto. A slider lets you choose how big or small you want your album art to be. Album art is organized according to name by default, but this is changeable via the View menu. So if you want to sort albums by release date, you can do so.

As you can see, it shows ‘Hopes and Fears’ first instead of ‘Under The Iron Sea’ because ‘Hopes and Fears’ was released first.

One great thing about Coversutra is that it does not use iTunes to play the songs. It’s its own app and plays songs without iTunes. And song control is great. The time bar at the bottom lets you skip around in songs just like iTunes. The control menu lets you change the playback settings around a little bit too, in case you don’t like standard play.

I think Coversutra has great potential. It will be an alternative and stylish way to browse your iTunes library. Good work, Sophia.