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I spent my student loans on CDs rather than food and kept the bug ever since, so I have a similarly enormous pile of them: I do forget what I have because (through iTunes), it all becomes one big list.

What ends up happening is that you have to listen on random for a few days to rediscover stuff, every so often.

Failing that, if you've a Mac, try Clutter. If there's a Windows alternative, I don't know it although I'd like to.

...or doing the album art (not sure about this yet ... I may try to use one of the third-party utils this time around).

To get the album covers using Clutter rapidly, you can make a smart playlist in iTunes that selects the first song of each album. Then use Clutter to jump to the next song as soon as the current CD cover is downloaded (a matter of seconds normally).

I just started playing with Clutter last night to get the album art for my 350 CDs into my iTunes database. Very cool app. And it occurred to me then that if the iPod had a color screen, it could display the album graphic while playing. Of course, this alone is not a good reason to increase the price and add a color screen, but if color LCDs at that size become similar in price to the current monochrome ones, then why not? Maybe in a few iPod revs?

Clutter is a novel OS X app that provides a "Browse through your pile of CD's" interface instead of the alphabetized artist/genre list provided by most MP3 players.

It's also handy for grabbing cover art from Amazon or Google Images, and copying it into iTunes.

No Kiosk mode that I know of, though - that sounds like a neat feature.

-Andy

But you are right in that integration is (hopefully) the way of the future. It's happened more than a couple of times that I wanted to make something, and ended up building it around an existing program like the above.

And for those who do not know, almost all of the iApps have hooks so that other programs can, say, reference the itunes library, update the address book, modify pictures in your album . . .

Clutter from Sprote Research. It does live cover lookups of CD's playing in iTunes from Amazon's music site. Very cool and an easy way to find the cover art for CDs to put into your MP3 tag info.

First the one click sign up form has a small bug if you already have any apple account with a credit card. (e.g. mac.com, applestore, developer account, iphoto). The error messages they give are misleading as to the root cause of the problem but here is the trick to getting it to work. You must make sure that all of your apple accounts have identical info. when I say identical i mean exact. for example having a ten digit hyphenated phone number on one account and not on the music store record, or a different zip code will break it. Finally, counter intuitively, do not enter the security code number from the back of the credit card. the reason here is that the mac.com accounts dont have a place for it to be entered.

if all else fails, create a fresh account with a new e-mail address.

for cover art of all those tunes you did not buy from apple the best solution is clutter a freeware app that works with itunes. it auto lookups the cover art using amazon.com. it has some other feeatures too. but mainly it works slightly better than the one built into itunes since it does a more successful job of recognizing when two songs belong to the same album and avoids storing the cover art twice.

if you want to drag the cover art from clutter into itunes here is a procedure I recomend--I wish I could automate it. 1) open itunes and create a smart playlist of all track=1 tunes to get one tune from every album. 2) click on cover art display where it says "selection" and it will change to "now playing", 3) in the finder open ~/Library/Images/com.sprote.clutter/CDs and sort it by date.

now iterate the following, start playing the first song in your smart playlist, clutter will fetch the album cover, the finder will show a folder containing a jpeg. drag this to the album art in itunes, press command -> to move to the next song in itunes. rinse lather repeat. the only proble I encoutered was as I said in some cases itunes cant figure out that two songs are from the same album.

if you need high res cover art go to walmart's web site.

ps I spent last night playing with the store and after i got it to accept my credit card (yep the credit company called me to see if this was fraud too--multiple charges in a row for the same small amount is a fraud flag not an apple bug). I bought five peices of music before i realized this was like eating potatoe chips. flawless instant downloads, pristine music. fairly easy to find what I wanted, and though some things I wanted are missing the breadth of their coverage in other musical forms is astonishing. I even bough some music form artists I had never heard before because I found it while browsing. I really enjoyed the ability to fill in my music collection with a few songs I used to have on vinyl but would never be willing to buy the whole album again just to get those favorites.

and my conclusion is this. I've spent hours on kazza trying to download just a few songs I wanted. it rarely works the fist time since the servers beomce un avalaible or some dickhead entered the album decriptor wrong or the connection stinks or you cant find a decent bit rate or just part of the album..yada yada yada.

after using the applse site I realized what steve jobs was saying when he pointed out on cnn that using Kazza is like paying yourself minimum wages since you can only get 5 songs (= 5 dollars) in a hours worth of work!!! hopefully in a few years the price will drop even more at which point it will be way better than free,

THe only thing I was not too happy about was that I cant get these in mp3 format so I cant send them to my freinds with plain jane mp3 players. (you cant convert acc that you purchesed to mp3 in itunes--it will let you convert acc songs that you ripped yourself). I could burn a cd and re-rip them but by then the quality will be down. But franky this is just me being a weasel. its not fair use for me to mail songs around the globe.

At first glance, the 'Piles' metaphor (as exampled here) appears to be close to what 'Clutter' attempts to do with your CD's on a OS X desktop. Perhaps it may come in for some legal attention once 10.3 is released ?

This seems like an awesome UI concept, and one which will (Once again) put the Mac GUI head and shoulders above the rest.