Fetch iTunes artwork with Clutter

Album artwork comes with every purchase from the iTunes Music Store. If you don’t purchase directly from the iTunes Music Store, but still import your CD’s into iTunes, you’ll need a “quick” way to insert the album artwork, for each song.

It’s too cumbersome to scan in artwork from the actual liner notes, or even to get the artwork from Amazon.com, every time you import a new CD.

Clutter takes care of all of this, for us.

Clutter compliments iTunes, making finding the right album artwork a breeze, and even comes with some other great features to help you interact with your music library.

Album artwork in iTunes

Album artwork appears in the bottom left corner of the iTunes application:

It’s all fine that album artwork comes with every purchase from the iTunes Music Store, but what about when you import a CD into iTunes? How do you get the artwork, then?

If there is no pre-defined artwork for a particular song, in iTunes, the artwork window will appear as such:

Here you can add your own custom artwork (for custom playlists), or you can add the “official” album artwork, for the particular album.

To get the “official” album artwork, you have a couple of options. You can either scan it in to your computer, from the physical “liner notes,” or search for the artwork on the web.

Both approaches might be time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of CD’s to import.

Reduce the clutter

Clutter solves this problem. It automatically “fetches” the artwork for any song you’re currently playing, in iTunes.

By default, Clutter searches Amazon.com, for the artwork - so the chances that it will find the artwork are pretty good. You can also set Clutter to search these additional Amazon domains, each of which support album cover database searches:

• Amazon.co.uk
• Amazon.de
• Amazon.co.jp

Once the artwork appears in Clutter, you can then copy it over to iTunes, which applies artwork to each individual song:

More Clutter

You can think of Clutter as an alternative (and more personable) interface to iTunes.

At first glance, Clutter appears to be no different than iTunes. Listed alphabetically are each artist and album:

Since album artwork is the “main feature” of Clutter - the larger window above will either fetch the existing artwork from iTunes, or search for the artwork on the web.

Once the artwork is “fetched,” you can interact with it!

Drag it to your desktop:

Brilliant!

You could put all of your albums on your desktop, and never have to mindlessly scroll through an alphabetical list again!

You can select your music based on the album artwork, which is much more intuitive and user-friendly.

Go ahead and drag as many albums onto the desktop, as you wish. You can overlap them, and re-order them any way you please.

Double-click on any album cover, and it will start playing, through iTunes.

Those album covers stay safely on the desktop, so even when you have other applications open, they will remain hidden. A quick switch to the desktop (Exposé; is handy for this) reveals them all.

Other features

Clutter shows up in your Mac OS X dock, as the icon of the application:

More intuitively, you can also have that icon show the album artwork, of the current song playing, in iTunes:

Final notes

To me, using Clutter is a “no brainer.” The iTunes interface is becoming more “bulky” each time something new is released from Apple. Clutter is a light-weight application that does a simple task - and does it well.

I love being able to browse through hundreds of album artwork covers, much like I used to, when I used physical CD’s for music.

I hope Clutter continues to be developed.