Great iTunes And iPod Plugins

Originally iTunes was used by most PC users because it came bundled with an iPod, but over the years its become a great application for playing mp3s. But, did you know you could make iTunes even better by adding plugins? Although there aren’t hundreds and hundreds like with Firefox, there are enough plugins for iTunes to make things interesting.

Here are some of the iTunes And iPod Plugins I’m using currently or I’ve used in the past that you might think are worth giving a try.

Qloud

Tagging is all the rage at the moment and the Qloud for iTunes allows you to add tags to your music to help you find and group your music library. A ‘Qloud’ button is added to iTunes,which when clicked opens up the tab interface within iTunes which allows tags to be added and searched. Tags can be added to both tracks and artists. There’s even a Tag Cloud which shows your most popular tags.

More: Qloud

The Filter

One of the problems of having a big music collection is it that it can be hard keeping track of your favourite tracks, and trying to create new playlists can take ages as there are so many tracks to choose from. What The Filter plugin does is take away this problem by creating playlists automatically for you. So, rather than randomly browsing through your music collection, The Filter can build playlists in seconds to fit your mood. This is a great way of re-discovering music you forgot you had or haven’t played for a while.

All you have to do is select one or two songs to give The Filter an idea of the type of tracks you want in your playlist, click the big black “F” button and it will magically create a new playlist for you.

To give The Filter a go yourself click here

MGTEK dopsip

I have no idea why this iPod plugin has such a weird name, but the MGTEK dopsip plugin is the only one I know that allows you to synchronize your iPod with Windows Media Player. It will even sync your media player playlists (it doesn’t sync album art though)

More: MGTEK dopisp plugin

iConcertCal

iConcertCal is a freeware plugin for iTunes that automatically finds and adds upcoming concerts matching artists from your iTunes library to iTunes. iConcertCal searches sites like Pollstar to update the concert info in iTunes once a week.

More: iConcertCal

iSproggler/Last.fm plugin

If you’re a Last.fm user then you will love the iSproggler plugin which allows you to sync your recently played iTunes tracks with Last.fm. This will allow you to share more accurate information about your music tastes with your friends and to improve the quality of your personalized radio streams.

More: iSproggler

I hope you enjoyed this list which will hopefully help you to get more out of your music collection. If you have any other iTunes tips or plugin you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.