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GimmeSomeTune – Free iTunes companion
By greg | September 3, 2008
Thanks to LifeHacker, I was exposed to this new free iTunes “companion” application (only for Mac) called GimmeSomeTune. Some of the features of this application include artwork and automated lyrics fetching (which is the best at preforming these tasks as far as I’ve seen compared to other add ons), iTunes notifications, iTunes controlling, Apple Remote Control compatibility, Last.FM, and even iChat capabilities.
My favorite feature is definitely the auto lyrics/album art fetching/embedding. I just hope this feature doesn’t end up in the same shoes as pearLyrics (was shut down because of some stupid vague copyright law argued by some greedy music-rights lawyer). Enough of that though… moving on. It took me a couple minutes to find the feature though.
Once you get GimmeSomeTune installed, click the added menubar musical notes icon in the OS X toolbar and go Preferences. Once the window loads, check the “Start GimmeSomeTune with iTunes” box (pretty self-explanatory function, right? I would hope so…). Now click “Artwork, Lyrics” and check the shown boxes below.
Once this is done, whenever you play a song in iTunes that doesn’t have artwork or lyrics, it will search the internet for them and automatically embed them into the songs. This all happens in seconds, too. This is really nice, especially for iPod users (which is pretty much… everyone in the US), because iTunes offers a feature to sync lyrics and artwork with your music. Makes displaying music 10x prettier 
Now that you have that configured, anytime you want to view lyrics for the song that’s currently playing in iTunes just go to GimmeSomeTune -> Show Lyrics… simple as that! The other features are pretty self explanatory. The Hotkeys allow you to control iTunes from anywhere on your Mac using keyboard shortcuts. I already have Quicksilver configured to do this, so this feature means nothing to me. The Mini-Controller simply adds the play/pause, skip, go-back icons to your MenuBar (I’d rather use keyboard shortcuts), the Remote Control allows you to configure your wireless remote if you have one, and the rest is self-explanatory.
I’m still fiddling around this program, so if you happen to find some feature you think I missed, feel free to let me know. Enjoy!
Edit: October 7th, 2008 at 5:56 PM
Since last writing this post, I’ve come to appreciate gimmesometune for the built-in Last.fm features. This is a great and most importantly non-bulky way to use Last.FM. It tracks all your playing online, You should definitely check it out. It’s a great way to be exposed to some new artists that you may like based on your music tastes. Implementing this is really easy. Just enter in your username and password in preferences, and you’re on your way! It took a bit before it started keeping track of all the songs I listened to initially, but now it works perfectly.
Edit: October 20th, 2008 at 12:58 AM
I recently purchased an iPod Touch (yes, it’s awesome…), and I’ve really come to appreciate the lyric fetching aspect of GimmeSomeTune even more. When you tap on the screen to get extra options when playing music, lyrics are nicely displayed. This was never terribly convenient on the the click-wheel iPods, thus I never really payed much attention to lyrics. So now that my lyrics are easily displayed (and easily read), I noticed that some of my songs’ lyrics were a mess. They were just one large mass of text – no spaces, line breaks, etc.
I started going through and manually copying/pasting from lyric sites into the iTunes song info, until I thought that perhaps somebody had found a solution to this. After some Googling, I found that GimmeSomeTune has a built-in “re-fetch” feature (Right-click in the GimmeSomeTune Lyrics window -> Select “Fetch Lyrics again.”) This instantly corrected the garbled lyrics. Really really nice! If you take a little effort and monitor this stuff when listening, it’ll make your iTunes/iPod experience quite a bit better
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Topics: Apple, Applications, Mac, Mac tips | 7 Comments »
October 7th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
This is a great application, thanks for the explanation how to install everything, couldn’t have done it without your help!
Take care!
PS I stumbled upon you through StumbleUpon
October 7th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Glad I could be of help, and thanks for letting me know that I was
That StumbleUpon is crazy… I got a couple thousand views because of it.
February 5th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Awesome!
Thanks so much for this it is one of the best apps that I have seen.
I also stumbled here.
February 5th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Again, glad to help
August 16th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
When I was using the lyrics part, it asked me, “did you ever fart so hard you ended up in another zip code?
August 23rd, 2009 at 6:41 am
Will this work on a windows based computer?
August 23rd, 2009 at 10:20 am
@JT – No, this won’t work in Windows. Eternal Storms develops only software for Macs.
If you happen to find something similar for PC’s, let me know, and I’ll post that info here.