You know that thing your iPhone does when you’re running the iPod and you turn it sideways and it changes from a list of songs to a nice row of album art that you can flick your way through? That’s called Coverflow! Just in case you didn’t know. Coverflow is cool, especially if you’ve taken the time to download album art in iTunes, but it’s just so… organized.

You know that thing your iPhone does when you’re running the iPod and you turn it sideways and it changes from a list of songs to a nice row of album art that you can flick your way through? That’s called Coverflow! Just in case you didn’t know.

Coverflow is cool, especially if you’ve taken the time to download album art in iTunes, but it’s just so… organized. The anal retentive among us surely appreciate this, but what about slobs like me? Enter Album Shuffle, a free alternative for viewing your iPod albums in a mixed up convoluted mess instead of Apple’s cool-but-rigid method.

Album Shuffle presents you with a random sampling of 14 album covers laid out in a big, messy pile, and if you don’t like what you see just shake and you’ll get a new pile of 14 more. You can drag the albums around, rotate them with a two-finger gesture where you hold one finger in place and move the other, and play the last-touched album in shuffle mode. A double tap will get you the track list. Sorry, you can’t pinch to make the album art bigger but it would be nice if Tapku would build that function into a future update.

If your music collection is small and frail, this app won’t do much for you… but if it’s big enough that you sometimes forget what the hell you’ve downloaded illegally bought from iTunes, maybe Album Shuffle is just what you need. I like the idea here and I think for most people it’ll be more novelty than anything else, but it’s free so I say it’s worth the download.

P.S. For those of you who have no idea how to download album art in iTunes, it’s real easy: just select Advanced from the iTunes menu bar, select Get Album Artwork, and then sync after it’s done downloading everything. If you have tons of different albums represented in your music library it could take a while to download all of them, but it’ll make this app (and Coverflow) soooooo much cooler.

iTunes Link – Album Shuffle
Version 1.0
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1

Thank you for not making fun of my crappy music collection

Read the rest here:
Q&F: Album Shuffle