SheepTech » iTunes

Setting Global Hotkey on iTunes

Vincent — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:32:35 +0000

Before I got my iPhone, foobar2000 was my primary music player. Which feature do I miss most after making the switch to iTunes? Not the lightweight-ness, not the components (add-ons), but the ability to control the player using hotkeys no matter what you are doing on your PC.

Say I want to watch a YouTube video. I would have to summon the iTunes window just to pause the song, then switch back to my web browser to play the video. If I were using foobar2000, I would just need to hit the hotkey to pause the song while I’m still on my web browser, making things faster and less tedious.

You can however compensate the missing feature by using one of these third party utility.

HKTunes

You can do nothing extra with this small utility other than assigning global hotkeys for iTunes. The user interface is definitely not the best, but considering this is a one time job, it doesn’t really matter much.

Instead of typing your desired hotkey, you were to select it from a list of keys.

I’m using HKTunes on my PC, for I wouldn’t want to install other heavier alternatives just to add such simple functionality. It uses just slightly under 4MB of memory.

You have to keep HKTunes opened the whole time you want your hotkeys to work. Pressing your hotkeys will do nothing if the program is closed.

[HKTunes]

iTunes Global Hotkeys Plugin (ighp)

Unlike HKTunes, there is no need to start another program just for the hotkeys to work. ighp is an iTunes plugin, meaning it’ll be part of iTunes and will work outright whenever iTunes is on.

Download the files, place them in iTunes plugin folder (C:\Program Files\iTunes\Plug-ins), launch iTunes, press Ctrl+Shift+P, configure the keys and off you go.

I would have use ighp if it works. Too bad, iTunes will not launch with the plugin installed on my PC. Your milestone might vary though, I’d suggest giving this a try before concluding.

[ighp]

iTunesControl

You can do much more with iTunesControl than just assigning the usual playback global hotkeys—like searching songs from playlist (another feature I miss from foobar2000), song name display and sleep timer.

iTunesControl is still actively supported and developed. In fact, the latest version was released less than a month ago, so you won’t have to worry that it will stop working when you update to a newer version of iTunes.

[iTunesControl]

iTuner

iTuner is another utility that adds several extra functionality to improve your iTunes experience. You can view all its features here, which of course includes global hotkey customization.

[iTuner]

Apple Secretly Installs MobileMe in iTunes Update

Vincent — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:21:35 +0000

In the most recent update for iTunes, Apple has secretly included installation for MobileMe, a paid service specially for iPod Touch and iPhone owners. MobileMe is a service to keep your iPhone or iPod Touch synced even you’re working on a different computers, as your information will be kept online.

The thing that puzzles me, do Apple expect every of their iTunes user to be an iPod Touch or an iPhone owner? I have been using iTunes for two years and I do NOT own any iPhone or iPod Touch and MobileMe is definitely NOT going to have anything to do with me. I just like the phrase “Apple is installing commercial product without the user realizing it”.

You can have a look under Network and Internet in your control panel if you’re running on Windows Vista. You will see how the beautiful icon is being forced to sit there. Apple just doesn’t seem to understand what is a software update. First they include the entire Safari browser, now a MobileMe. What’s next? Installing the entire Apple website locally so that you can view them offline?

Tunatic Tells You The Song Name by Just Listening To It

Vincent — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:11:21 +0000

Of course it is frustrating when you listen to a song you like on radio, but you don’t know who sing that and the song title. You can end that frustration by installing a less than 500KB (after installing) freeware—Tunatic.

The concept is simple. Just let Tunatic to listen to the song that you want to identify, via a microphone, and within seconds, Tunatic will fetch the song name and the artist name from its database if it match something (make sure you’re online, of course).

Best of all, it doesn’t just work for English songs. I tried Chinese songs and it works too! Basically Tunatic will just fetch whatever song information that matches its database. And its database are maintained by the Tunatic community. It collects song information from users who wants to contribute via a program called Tunalyzer. Too bad, Tunalyzer only works on Mac OS X at this moment, else I will contribute too.

I tried recording a song to using my mobile phone, and then play it to Tunatic, and it identify the song perfectly as expected. That would be useful if you listened to a song that you like, either at the radio or in a shopping complex, just grab your phone and record it. When you are home, let Tunatic listen to it, and you will then be able to identify the song name and the artist’s name.

Too bad, Tunatic couldn’t recognize the tune if you sing or hum it. Else you can just remember how to song go, and sing it to Tunatic for the song name. Thilak get it wrong for this part. Once in a while, there will be a really great software coming out from nowhere. This is definitely one of them.

via TechBuzz