Overwhelmed as I am by the absurd number of widgets for Macs and Windows that whizzed through the site over the past days? Me, too. Here’s a look back to keep it all straight:

Part I: For Konfabulator — onetonnemusic roundup, drum pad/pattern machine; For Dashboard: Guitar Chords, Oblique Strategies, Symphonic for iTunes

Part II: For Dashboard — BPM Widget, Audio Calculator, Chord Reference, ittyBittyMidi MIDI monitor, Music Calculator, Create Annoying Bass Grooves

Part III: For Konfabulator – Guitar Tuner, Beat Meter, iSpeak text-to-speech, Scratchpad virtual turntable

Part IV: For Dashboard – CountBPM, Digidesign/M-Audio widget, Piano, SoundVolume, Krispy Kreme (because while you can make music without doughnuts, why would you want to?)

Part V: Last and least, Circle Clock, for those who can’t remember either their key signatures or to wear a watch

Addendum — managing Mac widgets: I’ve found several resources invaluable for keeping my widgets in order on the Mac. First, upgrade to 10.4.2 or later for Apple’s widget management tools. WidgetUpdate tracks your installed widgets for new versions, perfect for keeping ahead of bugs. Dashboard Widgets complements Apple’s site nicely. Don’t forget to download and purchase Amnesty to keep widgets visible at all times.

Fire up all these handy musical tools on your Dashboard (or Konfabulator), and keep them handy.

Final Score: The Mac wins handily — more widgets, even if you don’t count the ability to run both Dashboard and Konfabulator on the Mac. But with Konfabulator part of Yahoo, that could change in round 2. Either way, widgets are here to stay.

So, your appetite for musically-useful widgets to run on Dashboard (OS X Tiger only) and Konfabulator (Mac/Windows) still isn’t satisfied? Fear not: Adrian Anders writes in with four more, all for Konfabulator — so Windows users aren’t left out of the fun. (All these widgets are cross-platform.)

Guitar Tuner: Nice graphics and both standard and drop-D tuning (though no tuning meter — you’re on your own for that)

Beat Meter: Ugly as sin, but you can tap tempo or set a metronome marking

iSpeak: Text-to-speech conversion for when you’re in a Radiohead OK Computer mood.

Scratchpad: Looks like a turntable and makes scratching sounds! Nifty! So, uh, why is there a debate in comments about whether this was “useful”? Guess that’s a matter of opinion. I find my magic 8-ball useful.

See part I and part II of this report.

The musical widget madness continues. powermac99 from iCompositions points out his Dashboard Widgets site. Like Apple’s, it’s beautifully organized and easy to navigate — too bad Konfabulator’s site is overwhelming. (Maybe that’ll change with Yahoo.)

I’ve been hunting around that site finding still more widgets:

CountBPM is my favorite BPM counter yet: click or keyboard input tap tempo, and you can view lots of data to help you accurately guess the tempo.

Digidesign Widget lets you search both Digidesign and M-Audio.com for products and tech info.

Piano isn’t just a keyboard widget. It supports QuickTime synths, QWERTY and mouse input, configurable velocity, and lots more. Useful for plunking on the road.

SoundVolume is a volume widget, and it looks kinda like the faders on my Mackie.

KrispyKreme, while not strictly music-themed, keeps my blood-sugar level safe. Now if it could only tell me when the doughnuts are hot.

Maybe we should create a CDM widget after all. It can’t just search CDM, though: it needs to count BPM, tune your guitar, and check your record sales at the same time.

Be vewy vewy qwiet — I’m hunting Widgets.

Yes, widgets are all the rage these days. Between Apple’s Dashboard, included with Mac OS X Tiger, and Konfabulator, which just became free for Windows and Mac and has morphed into Yahoo! Widgets, nary a desktop shall be without little floating things. The idea isn’t entirely new — look back to the 1984 Mac’s Desk Accessory, or, well, to all the stuff that’s sitting on my real desk. But tools for easily creating your own widges are making these proliferate.

Anything useful for music? Well, yes and no. onetonnemusic has a roundup of music widgets for Konfabulator that are mostly on the side of silly. Funnel found three keyboard widgets (basically useless), and one kind of nifty drum pad/pattern machine. These should at least provide amusement and inspiration for something more practical.

On the OS X side, there are some semi-useful Dashboard widgets. Check out Guitar Chords, which displays fret positions for any chord you enter. (Nifty!) If you’re stuck in a creative rut, I’ve always been a fan of Oblique Strategies, a fabulous fortune cookie-esque set of admonitions to think outside of the box, developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. While it’s geared to music listening more than music making, I also like Symphonic, which lets you type in a song to have iTunes play it for you (especially useful for tuning in Net radio). I’ll pass on many other widgets, just because I don’t like to crowd my Dashboard.

But there have to be other options for Konfabulator — ahem, Yahoo! Widgets and Dashboard. Got favorite widgets? Designed any yourself? Send them here, and I’ll do a roundup; hit comments or drop me a line.

I asked for more truly useful music widgets, and did reader Justin Maxwell ever respond — a huge list of stuff here:

BPM Widget Tap tempo and get BPM

Audio Calculator BPM conversion <-> milliseconds (as observed here previously

Chord Reference Another guitar chord reference, with especially slick graphics

ittyBittyMIDI My favorite of these — monitors incoming MIDI signals, perfect for configuration and troubleshooting

Music Calculator Converts between note values and time, with plenty of extras

I especially love that these are (a) actually things I’d use and (b) make sense as a widget rather than a full app. (For an alternative approach, of course, there’s still a widget that can create annoying bass grooves. (Sounds like create digital music’s evil sister site.)

But, Konfabulator fans, these are all Mac-only Dashboard widgets. Where are the Konfabulator gems? Find em, write me about them, or let’s make some of our own.
See also: part I.