Wednesday, 13 September 2006

iTunes

iTunes is Apple's all-in-one music ripper/library/player/shop front, and should require no further explanation.

Resources:

  • syncOTunes - merges libraries across machines.
  • Fetch Art, a scripting add-on that looks up Amazon cover art (sure beats scanning and cropping the inserts).
  • phptunest, a PHP script that reformats the XML files that make up the iTunes library as HTML tables for display.
  • LAME encoder add-on.

Notes:

  • Dragging files to the library with the Option key held down will add (but not copy) them to the library, which is useful for managing things on network drives.
  • When (re-)tagging MP3 files with Western European accented characters on a Linux system for use with iTunes, make sure you use ISO-8859-1 encoding:
$ export LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1; easytag &

Oriental (Japanese or Chinese) tagging using BIG5 or Shift-JIS are another problem entirely, though. Not even UTF-8 (which should be the uniform representation by now) seems to work.

References:

Known Bugs:

Version 4.9

  • When adding album cover art by selecting multiple items and using "Get Info", iTunes will not add cover art to any files it happens to be processing for determining volume levels. Other ID3 fields, however, will be filled correctly. (Radar Bug ID# 4225479)

Trivia:

Here are the different icons across versions (up to 7.0):

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