Clutter your desktop!

I’m normally a neat-freak, but not this time, well not since I discovered Clutter (which is for the Mac OS X I hasten to add, you Windoze people just have to dream of getting such a slick app/utility for free for your OS! ;)) I forgotten where I stumbled on it, and I must have downloaded it a while ago as it was just sitting in the downloads folder waiting to be taken care of… well, as today is a holiday in Bahrain and didn’t have much to do, I unarchived it and started playing… this is the result:

Well what the hell is it then? It’s quite simply giving you back your music collection that you have spent countless hours digitising – only to ultimately lose because the collection now is just a list. Clutter allows you to download the album cover graphic from Amazon or Google for it, once it is downloaded you can copy the graphic to your iTunes and more importantly, you can just drag the album cover on your desktop where it becomes just a floating window really, that you can stack and/or organise the way you want to.

This visual representation of the music collection actually already allowed me to rediscover some of the music I’ve not listened to for a while! I’ve digitised more than 12GB (over 3122 tracks, 296 albums and 621 artists) which can take quite a while to listen to (actually iTunes tells me 9.3 days!), so I just stick to playlists I create every few MONTHS (yeah, I know.. I don’t give a damn).

Having a bunch of album art on the desktop and the ability to just double click on any album and it plays through iTunes is great!

The downside of course is that you’ve got to spend quite some time QAing and assigning album art to your albums… I know that there is a utility somewhere that would scan your collection and download all album art at once, but I forgot where I saw that… it would be nice if someone combines both of these utils, or add this scanning feature into Clutter as well.

What I beautiful wasted day!