Bowtie for Mac

Offering a front-end customizable media player that lets you control playback of your music, Bowtie for Mac gives you an easy way to listen to music while searching the Last.fm database and updating any missing tags or cover art from your music library. It's lightweight and highly customizable, and you can even have it as part of your wallpaper, on your Dock, or in the Menu Bar. It's a nice app for music lovers.

Bowtie for Mac's interface resembles the one used on the sixth generation of iPod nano; all you see is a small rectangle displaying the cover art. A double-click reveals the playback controls. One thing to note is that if you don't have iTunes or any other media player and library set up, this main window will not appear. In the app's options you can set up custom shortcuts to handle playback, which we recommend, since we found the default setting to be somewhat overlapping with OS X defaults. Integration with Last.fm works well, and if there's enough information in the song file, the app will automatically populate any missing tags or artwork. What you'll probably also like is the ability to customize Bowtie to your liking by downloading one of many available skins.

Want to use onscreen controls to manage your music collection? Or to retrieve song information from Last.fm? Then you'll enjoy Bowtie for Mac, with its nice features and accessibility. It's a good companion app to iTunes, Spotify and Rdio -- and best of all, it's free.