Clutter
Copyright ©2003–2005, Sprote Rsrch.
http://www.sprote.com/clutter/
clutter@sprote.com
¨
Version 1.0b2 — 7 February 2005

Note: Before emailing us about a problem, please check the "Troublshooting" section below to see if it's answered already. Thanks!

Introduction

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...

OK, Cut To The Chase. What Is This Thing?

Clutter is a small Mac OS X application that lets you put music CDs on your desktop. You can drag them anywhere — they're really windows. Line them up neatly or put them in piles, it's your choice. Each one looks like the real CD's cover, and double-clicking it tells your music player (iTunes, or a device such as a SqueezeBox or Roku SoundBridge) to play that CD.

Creating these windows is easy. There is a Now Playing window that shows what's currently playing in iTunes. It automatically gets the cover picture from your iTunes 4 database, or looks it up on Amazon.com, and displays it. If Amazon doesn't have a picture, you can find it elsewhere and drag it in from your browser. Or you can scan it yourself and paste it in. Then  you can drag the picture out of the window onto your desktop and it turns into a CD window.

But there's more! This is the age of digital convergence, after all.
• If the CD was located on Amazon.com, you can jump to the Amazon web page for that CD. This is useful if you'd ... forgotten ... to buy the CD and are overcome with guilt.
• Or you can do an instant Google search of the artist/album, if you want to find other interesting stuff about it.
• You can copy the picture to iTunes 4.

Requirements & Installation

You'll need Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar" or later, and iTunes 4.5 or later. You'll also need an Internet connection for Clutter's automatic CD lookup features to work. (If you're not online, you can still paste in cover pictures manually.)

To install, put the Clutter application icon anywhere on your hard disk. You may want to put it in the main Applications folder, though that's not essential.

Double-click it to launch it (duh). If you want it to start up automatically whenever you log into the computer, open System Preferences, select Login Items, and drag Clutter into the list.

NOTE: If you live in the UK, Germany or Japan, you'll probably first want to open up the Preferences panel and select your country's Amazon site instead of the default (US) Amazon.com.

If you want Clutter to monitor and control a Squeezebox or SoundBridge instead of iTunes, choose "SlimServer" from the Control menu, then enter the address of the computer on your network that's running the SlimServer software. (If that's the same computer you're running Clutter on, use "localhost" as the address.)

Adding To The Clutter

Launch iTunes and play something. After a few seconds, Clutter's "Now Playing" window will display the track name and the artist and album. (A little spinning progress indicator appears at the top of the window while it's searching.)

If Amazon has a cover picture, that will be shown. If Amazon has more than one match, up-and-down arrows will appear to the right of the picture; you can click them to cycle through the matches. (Amazon searches are done by keyword and may not be exact. Moreover, iTunes and Amazon may not agree on the exact name, which can cause confusion.)

If Amazon doesn't have a picture, an image of a blank CD will be displayed. There are two things you can do. First, you can choose "Find Cover On Amazon..." (Cmd-F) and, in the search sheet, change the artist/album names in the text fields to fine-tune the search. (Sometimes it helps to remove the album name, entirely or except for one or two key words.) If you find a match, click the picture and press the Choose button.

If Amazon didn't work out at all, you can congratulate yourself on your non-mainstream musical tastes and look for the cover picture elsewhere. (Cmd-G will open a Google search, to get you started.) If you find it on the Web, just drag the picture from your browser into the picture area of the Now Playing window. As a last resort, you can always put the CD into your scanner, scan it and copy the image to the clipboard, activate the Now Playing window, and Paste.

Choose "Copy Cover To iTunes" to do exactly that. Note, however, that iTunes 4 stores an uncompressed copy of the picture in each track's MP3/AAC file, so this will grow the size of your music library by a megabyte or so.

Now, there's no reason you have to choose a picture. If you don't care, you can just leave it as the default "blank CD" image.

NOTE: Compilation or various-artists albums can be a bit tricky. If you've set a separate artist for each track instead of using a single name like "Various Artists", then make sure the "Part of a compilation" checkbox is set in the iTunes info window for each track of that album. Otherwise Clutter won't be able to tell that the tracks are part of the same album.

NOTE: Currently Clutter doesn't search Amazon's classical-music database, only "pop music" (everything else). That needs to be fixed.

NOTE: If you run Jaguar (10.2) with your screen is in "Thousands of colors" mode, Safari may flip the picture upside down when transferring it to Clutter. To work around this, set your screen to Millions and relaunch Safari; or upgrade to Panther.

Managing CD Windows

Once the cover is the way you like it, just drag the picture out of the Now Playing window onto any other location on the screen, and it will stick there as a window. From now on, to play that CD, just double-click the window, or click it and choose the Play command (Cmd-P). Or to play a specific track, control-click the CD and select the track from the contextual menu that appears. (For those with two-button mice, right-click works too, of course.)

A CD window may not have title bars, but it behaves mostly like a normal window. You can click to bring it to the front, drag to move it around. The "Bring All To Front" command in the Windows menu will being all Clutter windows to the front, as will clicking Clutter's Dock icon. You can also select any CD by name from the Windows menu in case you went overboard on the "clutter" theme and managed to lose it underneath other CDs.

To get rid of a CD window, choose the Close command (Cmd-W).

CD windows are a little unusual in that they support multiple selection. Note after clicking on a window that it shows a green border. This means it's selected. You can select multiple windows by shift- or command-clicking them, or use the Select All (Cmd-A) command.

Dragging a CD actually moves all selected CDs. The Delete key will delete all selected CDs at once.

You can use the commands in the View menu to make CD windows larger or smaller, or hide their drop-shadows. These commands apply to all selected CDs.

What else? Turning on "Snap To Grid" from the View menu will help you precision-align CDs if you're a neat-freak. You can copy the CD's picture using the Copy command, or paste in a new picture from any other app using the Paste command. You can choose "Buy From Amazon" to open the Amazon.com page for the CD in your browser, or "Search Google" to run a Google search on the artist and album name. (The Amazon command only works if Clutter was originally able to find the CD on Amazon and knows its Amazon ID number (ASIN)).

Clutter’s CD Browser

Clutter now has its own browser window for choosing CDs from your iTunes library. Choose "Browser" from the Windows menu to open it.

The left column is a list of all artists. If you select an artist, the middle column will show all albums by that artist. If you select an album, its cover will be shown on the right. To look up a cover on Amazon, use the Find command.

To play the selected album, double-click the title or the cover or press Return.

To put the album cover on the desktop, drag it out of the window.

Troubleshooting and Other Questions

"The Now Playing window is gone! How do I get it back?"
Choose the "Now Playing" command from the Window menu.

"In iTunes, I started playing a CD / stopped playing a CD / switched tracks, but Clutter's Now Playing window took a while to update."
Upgrading to iTunes 4.7 or later should remedy this. Versions of iTunes prior to 4.7 unfortunately didn't notify other apps when it starts/stops playing a track, so if such a version is running, Clutter has to keep asking it. In general, Clutter only asks once every ten seconds, to avoid making a pest of itself. So you might have to wait up to ten seconds for the window to update after you do something in iTunes.

"Clutter stopped responding to my commands for a while."
Was there a spinning thingumbob at the top of the Now Playing window? If so, Clutter was talking to iTunes or to Amazon.com. Sometimes iTunes doesn't respond very quickly (especially while it's ripping a CD), and sometimes Amazon is slow, or your Internet connection might be having problems.

"Clutter stopped responding to my commands forever. It's hung."
Oops! Sounds like a bad bug. Let us know (clutter@sprote.com) as much as possible about what was going on, especially whether the thingumbob is spinning in the Now Playing window. If you're Terminal-savvy, running "sample Clutter 2" and enclosing a copy of the file written to /tmp would be a huge help.

"Clutter crashed."
Double-oops! As above, let us know. If you have crash logging enabled, please enclose a copy of the most recent backtrace from the crash log. (If not, you can enable crash logging via the Console app's preferences.)

"Clutter made an iTunes playlist called "(Clutter)". I don't want it doing that."
It turns out that, due to limitations of iTunes's AppleScript support, the only way to reliably get it to play the entire album in the correct order is to put the tracks into a playlist, then play the playlist. This was a last resort, but it works pretty well. (Any scripting gods out there who know a better way can write to clutter@sprote.com with suggestions!)
You can delete the playlist if you want, but Clutter will recreate it the next time you tell it to play a CD.

"I put a CD from someone else's shared iTunes library on the desktop, but now Clutter can't play it."
There's no way for a script to tell iTunes to play a CD from a shared library. We've tried. For one thing, you can't create a playlist in a shared library, and Clutter needs to create a playlist to play a CD (see above).

"The Now Playing window doesn't show a picture of a particular CD, or it shows a picture of the wrong CD."
This means the Amazon search didn't turn up the correct results. There are a number of reasons this can happen.
• Amazon doesn't carry that CD.
• Amazon carries the CD but has no picture of it (this happens).
• Amazon misspelled the name of the artist or of the CD.
• Your MP3s have misspelled artist/album names (in their ID3 tags). Make sure the name that shows up in the Now Playing window and iTunes is correct.
• There may be other CDs, even by other artists, that have keywords so similar to those of the current CD that the Amazon search threw them in as a surprise gift. There's nothing you can do about this, but that's why we gave you the little arrows so you can select the right CD, and the Google command so you can do your own web search for the cover.
If you're really sure it's Clutter's mistake, try going to www.amazon.com and typing the name of the artist and album into a Popular Music search, and see if the results differ. If so, let us know the exact name of the artist and album.

"Sometimes a CD with no cover art shows up in the Find results."
That's because Amazon carries the CD but doesn't have a picture of it.

"How do I remove a CD from the desktop?"
Click on it (a green outline will appear) and press Delete or Cmd-W, or choose Delete from the Edit menu or Close from the File menu.

"iTunes' audio skips for a moment when I copy a cover to the album being played."
Yup, that's an iTunes 4 issue. Nothing we can do about it.

"When I listen to streaming radio, Clutter only shows the name of the station, not of the track being played."
iTunes doesn't make the name of the track available to other apps, although it displays it in its own window. There's nothing we can do about it, besides complain (we have).

"I don't use iTunes. Will Clutter work with other MP3 players?"
Clutter currently supports SlimServer, which drives various MP3-player stereo components such as the SlimDevices SqueezeBox and Roku SoundBridge. But there's no support yet for other MP3 player apps like Audion, although someone could write code to support a particular player and submit it to the Clutter open-source project.

"Can't Clutter automatically look up cover pictures for all the CDs in my iTunes library?"
It could, but frankly, we're afraid of pissing off Amazon if lots of people start using this feature and hammering on their servers.

"Why just Amazon? Clutter should be able to get CD covers from _______ too."
Amazon is the only site we've found that (a) has a lot of CD covers, (b) offers a way to search for and retrieve them, and (c) allows developers to use this feature. People have suggested allmusic.com, but their privacy policy forbids (c). If you know of another site that would work, please email us and we'll consider adding it (especially if you send us some Cocoa code that does the search!)
Remember, you can always do your own CD cover search at your favorite website and drag/paste the picture into Clutter's "Now Playing" window.

"I want Clutter to use my country's Amazon site instead of amazon.com."
Amazon is adding XML search capabilities to their country sites one at a time. Right now (December 2004) the only other countries supported are the UK, Germany and Japan — you can use the pop-up in the Preferences panel to select one of those. As other countries come on board, we'll add them too.

"I want to copy all my Clutter info to another computer. What files do I need to copy?"
The database (such as it is) of cover pictures and Amazon ASINs is located in the folder "Library/Images/com.sprote.clutter" in your home directory. 
The list of windows currently on their desktop (and their locations) is stored in the file "Library/Preferences/com.sprote.clutter Windows.plist" in your home directory.
You can copy either or both of these to the same location in your home directory on another machine.

"I want to get rid of all the data Clutter copied to my disk."
Same as above, but for "copy" read "delete".

"Clutter gets slow with a whole lot of CDs open."
Every CD is a window, and the Mac OS X window server doesn't perform well with huge numbers of open windows. Don't use Clutter to leave hundreds of CDs lying around — that's what the convenient alphabetical lists in the browser window are for :-)

Release Notes

1.0b2:
• New image, courtesy of Laurent Baumann, for an album whose cover isn't known: a round(!) gold CD.
• Clutter is better about repositioning windows that no longer fit onscreen (due to a resolution change, or disconnecting a display) and restoring them to their original position when possible.
• You can now type or use the arrow keys in the browser window without having to click on the list first.
• Type-selecting artists or albums in the browser works again.

1.0b1:
• Made Clutter stop crashing on launch on OS X 10.2. Sorry about that, Jaguar users!
• Amazon.co.jp cover lookups work now. Thanks to Shuichi Kodama for the fix.

1.0d19:
• Fixed a mistake I made merging the Japanese translation.
• Added a (partial) German translation, thanks to Jonas Zimmermann.

1.0d18:
• Clutter is now fully localizable, and Japanese and French translations have been added thanks to Yuzuru Shiraiwa and Jean-Jacques Ardoino. (Email us if you'd like to provide additional translations!)
• Playlists are now shown in the browser, as a special category below "Compilations".
• Playlists have a special default picture (a stack of CDs).
• Playlists show their titles even when assigned custom covers.
• Fixed a problem where the "Treat iTunes playlists as CDs" pref (now renamed "Give playlists their own covers") would think things were playlists that weren't (resulting in a "null" playlist being displayed).
• Titles have a white glow around them to make them more legible against dark backgrounds. (Not available on 10.2, sorry.)
• A "Show Title" menu command can turn titles on or off for covers on the desktop.
• At long last, selected covers are now highlighted in your preferred highlight color, instead of just green. (And there was much rejoicing.)
• The message "Launching iTunes..." appears in the status line of the Now Playing window.
• Clutter is now more reliable about detecting which albums are compilations.
• No more delay loading the music library (when opening the browser or control-clicking a CD cover).