bl(ip)og

How’s this for inspiration to write a program?

I used to play a lot of CDs at work. A clutter of newly-acquired discs, and older ones that had come back into heavy rotation, lay on my desk. When deciding what to listen to next, I’d run my eyes across them and something would catch my attention.

Now I use iTunes. I’ve ripped most of my CD collection to MP3, and I get new music in MP3 format from sites like eMusic and Epitonic, or in AAC format from the iTunes store. All of this music is a couple of clicks away — no more fumbling with jewel boxes. Great!

Well, except that I find, when all my music lives in a single huge alphabetized list in the iTunes window, that the things I’ve just acquired disappear into it and I don’t notice them as much. That great Loop Guru CD I downloaded from eMusic two months ago? I’d forgotten I had it! It’s down under “L” between Loop and Louis Andriessen, whom I don’t listen to often.

I wanted that clutter back. It may have looked messy and disorganized, but it was really a very efficient visual cache of stuff I was likely to be looking & reaching for, and a reminder of what was new. And the cover designs are pretty!

So I wrote Clutter…

Forget WinAmp — Clutter kicks the llama’s ass.

It’s a super small OS X program that, when running, watches iTunes and fetches the CD cover for the song that’s currently playing. If you want, you can drag the CD cover to your desktop — it then becomes a “shortcut” to iTunes. If you double-click on it, iTunes starts playing the CD. If you right-click on it, you can pick specific tracks of the CD to play. You can even have it copy the CD cover into iTunes, which then adds it to the MP3 files, giving you you CD art on your iPod.

As dorky as it sounds, I’m really digging “cluttering” my desktop with my most recent CDs. And the price? As with many awesome OS X applications, … it’s open source.

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