My iTunes and iPod Page

Introduction

I'm a fan of Apple's very successful software and hardware music products, iTunes and the iPod Touch. As someone who uses them with Windows 7-based systems, I thought I'd provide links to some resources for other users with such systems.

This page started out as an entry in my blog, and owes a lot to information found in this Slashdot article.

iTunes and iPod Information Sources

For iPod information sources, I have to recommend the official iPod support page and the associated discussion page. The "iPod->Connecting to Windows" folder has lots of good information regarding solving problems in getting iPods to talk to Windows-based PCs.

The iPod lounge and iPodSoft's Forum are also excellent places to find information and opinions.

Apple also has an official iTunes support page that corresponds to the iPod support page mentioned above, and also iTunes discussion pages that provide iTunes information and help for Mac OS, Windows, and iTunes Music Store users.

Oh, and the Microsoft Knowledge Base should not be forgotten. We had lots of problems with error messages coming out of the "Add New Hardware Wizard" every time we connected our iPod to our PC, and the resolution found in KB article 812581 cleared up this problem.

Programming iTunes for Windows

Information on scripting and writing plug-ins for iTunes in the Microsoft Windows environment is just starting to emerge. The best place to get started is probably with the iTunes COM for Windows SDK, a free package from Apple that contains documentation for the COM interfaces and some sample Visual Basic .NET scripts. The iTunes Visualizer Plug-In SDK is a resource which I have not investigated yet, but which should be useful for people who want to get beyond simple "remote control" scripting.

The amount of plugins and scripts available for the Windows version of iTunes is nowhere near what is available for Macintosh (see "Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes" for just one example), but I'm sure this will change quickly. Dan Crevier's Blog has simple examples in JavaScript and C# that are good starters.

Here's a script I wrote: iartcheck. It combines three alien entities: iTunes, Perl, and COM. This was made possible, by the way, through the use of Cygwin, which provides a complete Unix-like environment for Windows, including a full build of Perl that includes the ActiveState "Win32::OLE" module. It just goes to show that if you build your sandbox properly, any kind of children can play together. The script checks the album art in your song files, and reports any problems. It's simple, but might make a good template for more complicated things. I still need to add the ability to only process selected tracks, if any were selected, and to not stop iTunes if it was already running when this script was started.

And, finally, here's a writeup I just found with some interesting information.

iTunes and iPod Add-On Programs

Periodically I've scoured the Internet looking for Windows-based programs that enhance iTunes and iPod, and have found a couple of gems.

The best is iPodSoft's amazing and free iPod Agent, which lets you transfer songs from your iPod to your PC, transfer Microsoft Outlook contacts, calendars, notes, etc. to your iPod, and download weather forecasts, movie times, and other cool things into it, making it somewhat of a read-only PDA. [Note: In the time since I wrote this, iPod Agent is no longer free, and has been replaced by PodPlus, which costs $15.]

Another neat program on that site is iArt [also no longer free, unforunately], which fills in missing album art in iTunes. It's a bit buggy, and it would be nice if it could detect and use Folder.jpg artwork files in music folders, but it's still pretty cool. I am also looking at iTunes Art Importer as another program to perform this task.

The AMIP plug-in for iTunes is pretty neat, and allows you to do some pretty cool things, one of which is shown below, under "My Recently-Played Songs". Truthfully, I don't see the need for the add-on AMIP Configurator, as it adds a lot of overhead by requiring Java, unless you're doing some sophisticated mIRC stuff or need other options. Oh, and here's the obscurely-documented, but really important, thing to know about AMIP: To bring up the configuration screen, start iTunes, then press the hotkey combination Control-Alt-Shift-O (letter "oh", not number "zero"). I don't know where this is set, or where it can be changed, but the only place it's mentioned is in a small note that comes with AMIP for iTunes.

I accidentally installed localhost's MultiPlugin, and found that it replaced the Windows widgets with Aqua-ish ones, and put the name of the currently-playing song in the title bar. It also changes the minimize button to bring up the mini player instead of minimizing to the task bar, and it has an option to find song lyrics, but that doesn't seem to work. All in all, it's pretty neat, but I'm kind of uncomfortable with software that has no documentation and unknown functionality, so I removed it. [Please note that this opinion applies to version 0.52; the plugin has undergone substantial development work since then, and I need to revisit it at some point.]

SharePod and iPodLibrary both look pretty interesting, and I'm going to check them out as I have time.

iPod Hacks I'm Afraid to Try

Here are a few hacks that I am reluctant to try right now:

• Create a file named "_show_voltage" (without the "") on the iPod's hard drive, in the "iPod_Control/Device/" folder, and you will see the voltage in numbers rather than the little icon display of voltage (information was obtained from the iPod Lounge forums).
• Apparently, the left earbud can function as a microphone, according to this page. This feature may not work in 4G iPods or with newer firmware releases.
• Create a file named "_disable_cache" (without the "") on the iPod's hard drive, in the "iPod_Control/Device/" folder, and the hard drive will spin all the time when music is playing. Although pretty useless, this could benefit performers/DJ's who said they needed instant access to songs without the hard drive spin up time delay. (I forgot where I got this from, probably the iPod Lounge forums.)
• Linux for the iPod: ipodlinux.org
• A "How-To" guide to hacking the iPod's firmware so that you can change the graphics is available at this engadget page.

My Recently-Played Songs

This shows the last 100 (or so) songs I've listed to in iTunes on my Dell XPS M1730 laptop, in order from most-recently to least-recently played. It was built with the help of the excellent AMIP plug-in for iTunes, which has AAC support, can parse .m4a and .m4p files for track information, and can pick up rating and play count info from iTunes itself.

How did I do this? Well, I started with the example that comes with AMIP (by the way, Cygwin, or a Bourne-compatible shell and some common Unix utilities like "cut", "head", "sed", "expr", and an scp (ssh copy) capability are needed for this to work). I created a directory named "C:\iTunes\amipweb", then put these two files in it (click to view them, right-click to save them on your local system):

• songrow.template : This is a one-line file that contains HTML code for a table row, with AMIP variables for the various fields (%2 == Track Name, for example). The preset shown below uses this file as the template for creating the output file "songrow.html", which has the variables replaced by the actual values for the currently-playing song. I also massage the playcount, because reporting that a song has been played zero times doesn't seem right if I'm currently playing it, so I change "0" to "1". I leave the rating field alone here, because the "uploadsonglist" script manipulates it.
• uploadsonglist : This is a Bourne shell script that prepends the newly-created file "songrow.html" to the file "songlist.html", truncates it to 100 lines (if necessary), then uses "scp" to upload it to the remote directory.

Next, I added this AMIP preset and made it the default:

/template:(c:\iTunes\amipweb\songrow.template)c:\iTunes\amipweb\songrow.html
/exec:(c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe) -c /cygdrive/c/iTunes/amipweb/uploadsonglist

Finally, I put this SSI directive in the file you're looking at right now, to incorporate the contents of "songlist.html" into the current web page:

<table width="100%" border="1">
<col width="25%" />
<tr><th>Track Name</th><th>Artist</th><th>Album Name</th><th>Year</th><th>Genre</th><th>Count</th><th>Rating</th></tr>
<!--#include file="songlist.html" -->
</table>

So far, it works like a charm for me. Your mileage may vary.