Clutter:

April 22, 2003 12:52 PM

Clutter: A wondrous little application, Clutter grabs album info from a currently playing MP3 track, sends it off to Amazon, and comes back with an image of the CD cover. Once done, these images can be moved about the desktop at will; a double click plays the record in its entirety. And it's free. God bless the independent developer! [OS X and iTunes compatible only, unfortunately.]
posted by aladfar (13 comments total)

I like it! Mind you, with nearly 200 albums I don't know how much I'll use it when it loses the novelty value. And an annoyance: I precede the album titles in my collection with their year of release, so I have to manually search for each cover image.
posted by Utilitaritron at 1:32 PM on April 22, 2003

It is a wondrous little app, but the charm wore out after a couple of weeks. I loved seeing the little albums on my desktop, but since it is limited by the depth of the Amazon inventory my more obscure MP3s were left without cover-age.... so to speak.
posted by grabbingsand at 1:34 PM on April 22, 2003

That was a problem for me too, but then I read the documentation and discovered that any image can be drag-and-dropped onto the player. Live shows and other stuff is still a problem, but google found a nice cover for Wico's YHF demos, for example.
posted by Utilitaritron at 1:46 PM on April 22, 2003

It needs to be asked: Utilitaritron, why start each album title with the year of release?? Why not just use the Year field for that instead?
posted by bcwinters at 2:15 PM on April 22, 2003

You put a whole album on iTunes? However do they all fit? Besides, I can think of very few albums that I want to listen to all the way through.

*musicgeekfilter*
posted by divrsional at 2:38 PM on April 22, 2003

I can think of very few albums that I want to listen to all the way through.

Good grief, man!
I rarely skip a track on most of the albums I own!
posted by sonofsamiam at 2:53 PM on April 22, 2003

Funny that this app's named "Clutter". I think it's a cool idea (and I especially love how easy it is to dev for OSX, speaking as a long time anti-programmer who's now actually programming) but it really does clutter your desktop.
posted by jragon at 3:46 PM on April 22, 2003

I want to be able to rotate the cover windows to make an actual mess on the desktop — under Aqua wouldn't this be pretty simple to code?
posted by nicwolff at 4:12 PM on April 22, 2003

I want to be able to rotate the cover windows to make an actual mess on the desktop — under Aqua wouldn't this be pretty simple to code?

Yeah, like a jukebox. That makes total sense.
posted by machaus at 4:19 PM on April 22, 2003

Adding the year to the title puts albums into the 'right' order for me, fitting with the sort order of artist-->album-->song (or in my case, artist-->year album-->track# song). For Example, my Yo La Tengo collection is 1993-1997 Yo La Tengo sampler, 2000.1 Danelectro, 2000.2 And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, 2000.3 Saturday, 2002.1 The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, 2002.2 Nuclear War, and 2003 Summer Sun. This makes more sense to me than alphabetical by title.
posted by Utilitaritron at 4:28 PM on April 22, 2003

This is a very funky little app. Though it made me realise how few full albums I actually have on iTunes. Mainly random collections of Filepile stuff etc...
posted by laukf at 5:12 PM on April 22, 2003

I find most of these kind of apps to be so damn useless. Nice implementation though.
posted by password at 1:29 AM on April 23, 2003

What's the use if you can't de-seed your weed with it?
posted by bondcliff at 6:31 AM on April 23, 2003