MoreTunes monitors your media player and downloads a range of relevant information relating to the track being played, including track and album details, album art, lyrics, and Amazon user reviews.
Other tools includes a tag manager for on-the-fly tag editing and the ability to suggest tracks similar to the one being played.Launch moreTunes concurrently with your media player in order to access its functions. Here are some notes on this program.
- Media players supported: Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, Media Monkey, and QCD.
- The user interface: Moretunes has a nice, economical tabbed interface; if you just flip through the tabs, however, you might actually miss a whole bunch of functions that are accessible by clicking the “Menu ->” button on the main “Album” tab. Modify the preferences to make Moretunes reduce to the system tray when closed.
- Track & Album info: The main Album tab will display all the albums by the artist being played, with the albums containing that particular track highlighted in pink. It will also list all of the song titles on the album and highlight the current track.
Album art: is downloaded and displayed on its own tab. What’s cool is that when Moretunes is in mini mode (press F2) a draggable thumbnail of the album art is displayed onscreen, which is really a great way to view album art on your desktop when playing tracks (see screenshot). There is an option to save album art, but it merely saves it into a folder; it would have been great if Moretunes saved the album art into the mp3 itself (as ImageToMp3 does). Note that the images are downloaded off the web, and not read locally.- Similar tunes: click this option and MoreTunes will display a number of albums in the ’Albums’ tab that are similar in style to the song that is playing. I am guessing that this is information is the “customers who bought this also bought” information from Amazon. Somewhat rudimentary compared to such sophisticated services as Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker, but interesting nonetheless.
- Tag manager: the tag manager shows the mp3’s current tag info alongside the proposed tags that it downloaded. For ad-hoc tag changes it works great, but if you want to manage the tag info for a large music library it is no substitute for a sophisticated tag manager such as Mp3Tag. Note that you can scan a playlist and quickly flip through all the tracks in the ’ID3 Manager’ tab in order to edit the tags for all tracks in the playlist.
- Lyrics: this option opens a web page in your browser with the lyrics for the song that is playing; works most of the time; at times, however, it may display information on the song or artists instead of the actual lyrics.
- Biography: automatically searches for artist’s biography on biography.com and Wikipedia.
Album art: is downloaded and displayed on its own tab. What’s cool is that when Moretunes is in mini mode (press F2) a draggable thumbnail of the album art is displayed onscreen, which is really a great way to view album art on your desktop when playing tracks (see screenshot). There is an option to save album art, but it merely saves it into a folder; it would have been great if Moretunes saved the album art into the mp3 itself (as The Verdict: what I really like about the program is the floating desktop Album art and the ’similar tunes’ option; the other functions, to me, are merely an added bonus. And considering that MoreTunes on my machine took about 7 megs of memory (not a lot, but not quite lightweight) I think I am sufficiently happy with this program to keep using it. Check it out for yourself.
Version tested: 2.0.4
Compatibility: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP; no info on VISTA.
Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 2.23 megs).
