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Experience iTunes Like Never Before with Additional Freewares
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Having my Mac accompanying my daily life, it would be a miss without the companion of music. And for now, I still adore iTunes as my music player. However, there are still some limitations to the awesomeness of iTunes, such as hard to rate, difficult to find lyrics, little information in mini player mode, etc.
In this article, I am going to share with you some of the freewares that can make you experience iTunes like never before. Hope you enjoy it!
You Control: Tunes
Using You Control: Tunes, you will be able to see song titles of your currently playing track. This will help you keep track of your never-ending songs adding.
Apart from that, You Control: Tunes also helps you browse your iTunes songs without the need to really go inside the big iTunes tab. Though it consumes a bit of your luxury menu bar place, You Control: Tunes should be worth your try.
I Love Stars
I Love Stars is a free application that shows the rating of iTunes' currently playing song in the menu bar. The main idea of getting I Love Stars is to rate your currently played song without the need to go back and forth from iTunes, thus not breaking your workflow.
What I like from I Love Stars is that we can use universal shortcuts to give the rating. And half-star rating also available by double-clicking on the star.
TunesTEXT
TunesTEXT is a dashboard that displays lyrics of the song currently playing in iTunes. This lyrics data can be filled from the song's Get Info → Lyrics pane.
iTunes Current Song Menu
If you want to search for lyrics or display song duration on your menu bar then iTunes Current Song Menu will be a suitable choice for you.
These four freewares are complementing each other, from quickly showing song information up to easily giving star-rating, all of these can make you experience iTunes like never before.
But always there is a chance for me missing some of your favorite iTunes applications, it'll be most appreciated if you can give some inputs in the comment box below.
Categories:
Applications,
Audio
Tags:
iTunes,
music,
Music
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16 Comments
falcon eyez
Thanks man , thats so nice !
lew
Great choice of song anyway! Keep that good job. Love it!
Linux Geek
Hey falcon eyez, Wendy, the admin, is a girl. I'm gonna try out that first one.
shadowfax
This is my favourite iTunes controller --> Mousqueak http://homepage.mac.com/dy4/zumuya/Mousqueak/index.html I've been using it for months and it's freeware! It has some cool features :-) Enjoy!
Jamesith
I use GimmeSomeTune, it has a growl-like popup thingy (that seems ter respond faster) and downloads and stores the lyrics into itunes... It can also be used for keyboard shortcuts for itunes if you have one of the old keyboards without the actual buttony things. Only thing is, if you are skipping through the tracks too fast, it sometimes puts the wrong lyrics into the files >.> good none the less though ^_^ Oh, and it does artwork too http://www.eternalstorms.at/gimmesometune/
maarten
I just love Sizzlingkeys (which is 90% freeware, but has some minor features that can only be unlocked by paying the shareware fee)
CA7 and KR FTW
I second GimmeSometune. I can't believe it's not on here. WIth it, u can have a controller on ur menubar or assign shortcut keys to navigate through songs. I love how it finds artwork and lyrics for my songs. ALso, it can be synced with Last.fm .
Thaweesak
No mention of Bowtie?
Chris Wanja
GrowlTunes; it obviously requires Growl to use the notification system, but you can still use it to post ratings (whole star only though).
Soveet
Anyone tried Harmonic? thats a dashboard widget for extracting lyrics. just activate dashboard and get the lyrics inserted in the song file automatically. Also displays the lyrics. Here is the link to its website: http://mindquirk.com/apps/harmonic/
Pj
I third GimmeSomeTune, growl pop-ups are handy to view the lyrics on and it automatically assigns lyrics and album art to the track.
Few minor issues do creep up but to be honest as a freeware it is fantastic. It has also managed to load international lyrics and art (I've mainly got Japanese tracks so its usually in Kanji, Romanji and/or English translations and phonetics) as well.
Pj
I third GimmeSomeTune, growl pop-ups are handy to view the lyrics on and it automatically assigns lyrics and album art to the track.
Few minor issues do creep up but to be honest as a freeware it is fantastic. It has also managed to load international lyrics and art (I've mainly got Japanese tracks so its usually in Kanji, Romanji and/or English translations and phonetics) as well.
Myles O'Neill
I highly recommend Desktop Lyrics: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/desktoplyrics.html I combine this with Gimmesometune to have awesome song lyrics on my desktop - it works really well.
Greg Loesch
I definitely second the apps Desktop Lyrics and Gimmesometune. Gimmesometune is awesome... for those who want a little more in-depth look at it (I'm not trying to spam... promise), check out my blog posting -> here
Greg Loesch
whoops. Link is http://greg-loesch.com/mac/99/gimmesometune-itunes/
Lukather
iTunesTEXT is a GREAT app. Many THX!
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