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Tag Archives: iTunes

False Assumptions about FairPlay

Over at Gadfly, Peter Mulcahy complains about Randall Stross' recent article in the New York Times, which rightly castigates Apple for the limitations of the FairPlay DRM with which it encodes audio and video purchased from the iTunes Store. While I think commenter Markus Kolic is right in noting that Stross seems to be misreading [...]

QuickTime & iTunes, Bundled Together

The standard download of Apple's popular QuickTime software comes bundled with their iTunes application. While a standalone QuickTime download does exist, it is difficult to find.

iTunes Now Playing plugin

This open source iTunes plugin adds functionality that I have been looking for a long while - notification of the track currently being played through a small popup window that automatically disappears after a short period of time.
Via Chris Gonyea.

iTunes Music Store and Napster are Not Your Friends

The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes an excellent roundup of the most popular online music stores, identifying their flaws and explaining how they limit user freedoms. Of the four online music services that the guide suggests that users use instead, I take a look at Bleep and Audio Lunchbox.

iTunes Web Access

Since I was already thinking about iTunes, this post on Engadget about slurping tracks from your iTunes library to a PSP through WiFi got me into a pensive mood. While the howto that Engadget linked to is centered around a Mac-only shareware application called Dot Tunes, it occurs to me that the Internet community would [...]

SleepTune 0.2

Per Mr. Malik's request, SleepTune now provides the option to "wake up" iTunes after a specified period of time. You can download SleepTune 0.2 (along with source code). Please note that like SleepTune 0.1, it is licensed under the GPL. There may be errors in the code, since sleeping is something that I have not [...]

iTunes Music Library File Format

I previously wrote about my fruitless search to find the file format of iTunes Music Library files, and how I was able to use the iTunes COM Windows SDK to bypass this lack of knowledge.
If you do a search on Google for "hdfm itunes", my COM story is the first result. The third result, however, [...]

Announcing SleepTune

Among the links I came acrosswhile reading about iTunes and COM was a post by Sahil Malik, complaining about the lack of a sleep feature in iTunes similar to that on the iPod. The sleep feature on the iPod saves battery life by turning the player off if no music is playing and the buttons [...]

All Roads Lead to COM, an iTunes story

I sometimes wonder if my audience is divided. To put it simplistically, I imagine there are those who come here to read my complaints about Microsoft, and those who come to read my complaints about Bush. I sort of feel like Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg, which tells the story of how a minor [...]

The Importance of Open Formats

Over at Acts of Volition, Steven Garrity continues his writing about file formats, tackling office suite formats like those used by Microsoft Word and why they are important. As you might recall, I wrote about the first post in the series, which focused on music file formats like OGG and MP3. Again, I am not [...]