Jazz Odyssey

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I’ve tried a lot of jukeboxes and music mangement software, but I find myself returning to iTunes which just can’t be beat with its elegant simplicity. That said, iTunes still has a number of truly irritating quirks that are bothersome enough to get me to try a new jukebox every couple of months or so. But a couple of those quirks have been addressed by 3rd parties…let me call attention to a couple that are worth your time.

idleTunes allows you to quickly and easily find and insert album artwork into tracks in your iTunes music library. There’s no batch functionality unfortunately, but on an album-by-album basis it works very well. It also creates instant playlists of all your albums and/or all of your artists with one click, which is very useful if you have a library that is larger than will fit on your iPod. It can also export any iTunes playlist to M3U, PLS, or B4S formats to use with other music players, and removes “dead” tracks from your iTunes library (”dead” tracks are when the music file is no longer on your hard drive but the reference to it still exists in the iTunes library). idleTunes is “donateware”…its free to download and use and if you find it useful the author has a Paypal link on the idleTunes homepage where you can donate to the development effort if you wish.

One of the things that REALLY annoys me about iTunes is the need to switch to it as the active application when you want to pause, skip a track or otherwise make a quick change to what you are listening to. That annoyance is overcome with exTray, which allows you to control iTunes from your system tray or from a series of keystrokes (known as “hotkeys”) that you can define. exTray has a whole bunch of other useful features, including the ability to import/export track ratings and playcounts (very useful if you use iTunes on multiple computers) and the registered version (which costs $12.95) will synchronize those things for you. exTray shows the name of the album, song and the album artwork in a small pop-up that you can control and the pop-up does NOT interrupt the application you are working in which is a very welcome feature.

Now, if someone would only create a plug-in that allows for faster movement between tracks when renaming several at a time…