Saturday, July 29, 2006

iTunes integration finally complete!

Complete... that's a rare state around here! But after months of tweaking, rating songs, and trying different iTunes utilities, iTunes is working seamlessly and effortlessly.

The biggest challenge was to rate all of my music. I have almost 50 gigs, so leaving iTunes on Party Shuffle makes sense. Shuffle has an option to play higher rated songs more often, so this is the main point to rating your music.

As my favourite music gets played more often, it gets ranked more accurately on last.fm, the popular self-charting service (check it out if you aren't using it!).

QuickSilver integration: I used Synergy (I even paid for it!) for a while, but QuickSilver can do almost the same thing (for free!), and I have QuickSilver running anyway, so I get to free up a token amount of memory by removing Synergy. Is QS, I created triggers to control iTunes with global keystrokes for fast forward, pause, display artwork, assign a rating, etc.

QuickSilver displays artwork when a song begins, but I am also using a sweet little iTunes plugin called DockArt, which replaces the iTunes icon in the dock with the cover art from iTunes. Why bother? Because you can!

And if you don't have the cover art for your songs? You can use a dashboard widget that finds the art on Amazon. It's called... Amazon Art!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How did you setup iTunes fast forward? I see a trigger for rewind, but not fast forward.

Justin said...

The rewind trigger goes back to the beginning of a song. There isn't really a fast forward in the sense of scanning through a song; since a trigger is essentially a button press, you can skip to the next song, but you can't scan forward. For now, you'll have to open iTunes to do that.