Membrane Pro
Make your own music? This app’s got you covered
$19.99 Developer Simplest Ways, simplestways.com Requirements OS X 10.8 or later
Record covers aren’t what they used to be. Most of us are more likely to buy from iTunes or stream Apple Music than comb through record sleeves for hours. But covers still matter. They’re what you see in your music app, and more importantly what your potential listeners see in the iTunes Store, on Spotify, or on whichever platform musicians are trying to make a living. With Membrane Pro, you can make very effective album or track covers with the very minimum of effort.
Membrane comes in two versions: a free taster, which is ad-supported, adds a watermark, and only offers low-quality exporting; and the Pro version, which is ad-free and unrestricted. In the Pro version, the watermarking is customizable: you can select your own text or image, or disable watermarks altogether.
Membrane is essentially a graphics app with a single purpose: to create square album covers. And that’s a purpose it fulfills very well. Simply choose from the available templates and make them fit your exact requirements. If you’ve used any image app at all, you’ll pick it up instantly.
You can add images, overlay shapes and add text, automatically lock items to the edges or center, reorganize layers to put items in front of or behind each other, and get pixel-perfect control over text size, rotation and positioning. We particularly appreciated the preview panel, which enables you to see if the changes you’re making in the main section are going to be legible in iTunes. By default, it’s set to 50%, but you can scale it between 10% and 200%.
Membrane Pro may appear to be a stripped-down graphics app, but it doesn’t lack features. You get opacity and blend options just like you do in more flexible image apps, with separate options for the fill and the border, and you can adjust text spacing and line spacing too.
You can export your finished cover in two ways; either as a Membrane data file for sharing with other Membrane users, or as a PNG or JPG image file. The image will take the same dimensions as the original – 1400x1400 unless you change it – and you can choose between low, medium and high image quality.
the bottom line. We like Membrane Pro a lot. It’s a very specific app, but it does a very specific job very well. It’s perhaps a little limited - why album art but not flyers or posters? - but Membrane Pro delivers what it promises.