This program is a companion for iTunes (Windows). It analyses your music collection, collates the full albums that are contained within it, and displays the album covers (or spines), with various sorting and filtering capabilities to get to the music you want quickly and intuitively. It retrieves album art from Amazon automatically if required. It can also display album reviews, song lyrics and all other songs from the playing artist.

While iTunes version 7 has it's own cover art view, this does not aggregate tracks into albums unless you have ordered your track listing by album. iTunes Album Browser always aggregates albums correctly, with various sorting options such as :

Showing the albums you have added to your collection most recently first.
Ordering all albums by average rating, so you can see your top 10 albums of all time, or with some filtering applied too, your top 10 by decade/year etc.

Further advantages over standalone iTunes 7 :

Very easy to build and manage an album playlist (without dragging track selections).
Can view detail of the currently playing track/album in full screen view (reviews, lyrics, lists of similar artists/albums that may interest you - a great way to find new music you may like).
Spine view - just as if your CDs were stacked on a shelf.

You lose none of the features of iTunes itself, including the ability to synchronise with an iPod. Changing song ratings within iTunes Album Browser will automatically be reflected in iTunes and your iPod, and vice versa.

If you are a REAL music fan and want to listen to music as it was intended, as full albums with tracks in the correct order, then this is the program for you. However, it's also possible to use it as a "jukebox", to mix and match different tracks from different albums as you require. It's also possible to collate "best of" albums by artist or genre, using your own personal ratings.

"listen to music as it was meant, as full albums with tracks playing in the correct order and enjoy the album art and reviews"

Read 3d2f.com review here.

Additional Components

Requires Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0. You can get the .NET Framework from the Windows Update page.

Fetches lyrics from song file or (if not found there) the EvilLyrics cache. Get EvilLyrics here.

Important Note: This software is designed to run on Windows XP. It is not yet guaranteed to work under Vista, but work is under way to verify it on that platform.

NOTE: The trial download is a fully featured application but (unless it is within the free trial period) it may have certain restrictions imposed (30 albums, 30 plays). A licence fee (EUR15) is requested to lift these restrictions permamently and to fund it's support and future development of this and other projects. Evaluate it at your leisure, and if you like it please request a licence key via the Help menu to lift all restrictions.

Newly released versions will normally have a free unrestricted trial period for evaluation/beta-testing purposes. The program will work without restrictions until some fixed expiry date (see Help/About).

Also Available: iTunes Folder Watch - a small tray application which will allow you to set up "watch folders" for your music. This will monitor your watch folders and inform you when there are new music files which aren't yet in iTunes, and will offer to put them there for you (or just do it automatically). Details.