My post ‘Tidy Up iTunes MP3 Collection - Fix ID3 Tags and more‘ is by far my most popular yet. I’ve got so much traffic for the article and links from other sites that it is obvious that organising iTunes MP3 collections is obviously a hot topic. I think it’s amazing that Apple haven’t realised this and made it easier for users to manage music collections and tags directly in iTunes, rather than having to use other utilities.

Until they do, Downloadsquad.com have unearthed two more applications to help better organise iTunes. The first service is idleTunes. idleTunes can do all of the following for free:

• Find and insert album artwork into tracks
• Copy iTunes playlists to any MP3 player
• Export iTunes playlists as M3U, PLS, or B4S
• Remove “dead” tracks from your library
• Create playlists for all of the albums in your library
• Create playlists for all of the artists in your library
• Delete user playlists

Allowing iTunes to work with other mp3 players seems to be a growing area. The first person that creates a plugin that allows other mp3 players to purchase music via iTunes will be very, very popular.

The second app is iTunesKeys, which is a system-tray utility that lets you control iTunes
with global hotkeys or from the tray icon’s menu while in the background. This one is my personal favourite as I hate having to maximise iTunes to control it. iTunesKeys provides:

• Control playback - previous, play, pause, stop, next, rewind, fast forward & volume
• Display track info on song change, including artwork! (jpg, png and bmp)
• Find missing artwork for tracks! (internet connection required)
• Control iTunes with hotkeys or from the tray icon’s menu
• Rate songs - junk to classic…
• Launches iTunes automatically
• Can close iTunes when it exits