If you exclude the wildly amazing iLife suite from Apple, I think I’ve come across the greatest, most useful, most elegant piece of software I’ve ever purchased for the Mac: Delicious Library.

So a couple months ago, I actually had time to sit down and browse through the then-current issue of Macworld magazine. They happened to be doing a sort of “roundup” of useful software, but my attention was drawn to a review of a utility called Delicious Library.

Well, I downloaded it and it took me all of about 60-seconds of playing with it before I shelled out my $40.00 for a license. This was the program of my dreams that I’ve been waiting years to have: a one-stop, all-media cataloging program that’s so easy to use and so beautiful that I can’t adequately contain my excitement.

Over the years—like most of us—I’d tried cataloging my video/music/book collections in various purpose- or scratch-built databases for FileMaker Pro, AppleWorks or other software. The biggest chore was always having to manually type in all the information about the item: track names for CDs, Actors & Crew for DVDs, publishing info for books, etc. Needless to say, I never really kept this all up.

That’s why Delicious Library is a Godsend! Not only do I not need separate programs for each media type (it stores all types of music, video, game and books), I don’t even need to enter the info. In an absolutely brilliant move, they’ve incorporated an automatic lookup feature that goes directly to the world’s most popular media store—Amazon.com—that automatically loads all the information about the item including the cover art! You can even point it to one of the Amazon international stores like Germany, Japan or the U.K. for loading info on foreign items (very handy in my own case).

Better still, you can do it with your iSight camera through a little on-screen barcode scanner: just hold the barcode up to the scanner, wait for the beep, and the nice lady’s voice speaks back the item’s title to you from the info downloaded from Amazon! It’s just too amazing—I spent the next several evenings scanning everything in my house with a barcode.

Once everything’s in, it displays your collection in a viewer that by now is so familiar in the Mac world, that anyone can figure it out—it works basically like iTunes. Your media is displayed on graphic “Bookshelves” (akin to iTunes’ Playlists or iPhoto’s Albums) that you can create and organize on a whim.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it—download it now and try it out by visiting their website:

Delicious Monster Software

I wish I got something for each referral, but oh well. While the software still has some quirks and some features I’d like to see, it’s still amazing. I give it 6 out of 5 stars…