Tunesque is the slickest way to search iTunes right from your Mac’s menu bar

I hate searching iTunes, it’s slow, frustrating and time consuming, especially if I need to find an app and a song or any other combination thereof. Tunesque has made my iTunes searching so much slicker and faster over the past few days that I find myself looking for, and finding, things more often.

Tunesuqe is a small, free app that installs as an icon on your Mac running OS X Lion. Once the icon is clicked, it presents as a Spotlight-like search bat that you just enter your text into. Once you’ve entered your query, Tunesque goes out and finds all of the matches across the breadth of iTunes and presents them in a pleasant list form. If you enter the word ‘green’ for instance, you’ll get Green Light, a Breaking Bad TV episode, The Green Hornet movie, an Anne of Green Gables ebook, Green Day, Green Lantern comics and more.

Complete typing ‘Green Day’ and you’ll get a more focused list of movies, books and audio content about the neuvo-punk band. You can hover over any search result to get the full iTunes description and a price is displayed at the right of each entry. Click on any of them and Safari will launch with the link, which automatically redirects you to iTunes.

It’s the fastest way I’ve ever seen to search iTunes, faster even than iTunes Instant or any of the other web utilities that I’ve seen. It also presents the results in a pleasant-looking and orderly format.

You can also narrow down what categories Tunesque searches for you in the preferences. You have the option of un-ticking any of the basic sections of iTunes that it will serve you up, which can help if you only want to look for an app, for instance. There is also a selection for which countries iTunes results you’ll be seeing so that you’re always going to get items that are available in your country.

Almost every category is available except for iTunes U, Apple’s repository of educational lectures and content from major colleges. But developer Marco Tabini is working on that integration now, so it should be coming to the app soon. Best of all, Tunesque is free, as the app is supported only by a small commission that it makes through referral links to the iTunes store, at no extra cost to you.

Honestly, Tunesque is a very good utility that is executed with a sure hand to work inside the confines of the standard Mac UI. It’s become such a part of my daily routine of looking for things on iTunes that I find myself shuddering to think about going back to doing without it. If you look for anything on iTunes on a regular basis, I highly suggest checking out Tunesque now.