iTunes · Grey Nicholson

Dear LazyWeb, How Do I Make iTunes “Play Next In Party Shuffle” from Windows' Command Line?

2006-10-30T03:30:00+00:00

Hello LazyWeb. I know I always go to Wikipedia first, and then to Google, but you're my real favourite. Really. So could you help me out please?

See, I've got this noise-making program called iTunes, and you can use it to play musics with. Now, usually, when I play a music with it, I use Party Shuffle, along with a very complex set of smart playlists that I refer to collectively as “Autopilot”.

I invented Autopilot to play me the music that I most probably want to hear, but unfortunately it's not clever enough to figure out when I have a specific hankering for, say, Memorize, or Iwe, or even Shoreline.

“Psychic” is not an available criterion in iTunes. So I add songs to the Party Shuffle “manually” every so often. And it'd be nice if I could do that by right-clicking a file and selecting a “Play Next In Party Shuffle” option. To be able to do that, I need to know what command line parameters to pass to iTunes.exe... and I was hoping, LazyWeb, that you might know something about it.

Wikipedia's far too encyclopedic to include something as grubbily practical as command line parameters, and Google could only tell me how to add songs to my library or load my iPod. I knew Google wasn't really my friend – it didn't even know that I don't have an iPod. Silly Google.

Anyway, LazyWeb, what command line parameters do I need to pass to iTunes to make it “Play Next In Party Shuffle”? Answers on a postcard to lazywebplaynextinpartyshuffle@gkn.me.uk

Party Shuffle on Crack

2005-09-19T23:19:00+00:00

Seems it's possible to add your entire iTunes music library to the Party Shuffle just by misdragging the Library icon into the main window.

They should probably sort that out.

Bigger than an iPod nano

2005-09-08T04:23:00+00:00

iTunes 5 for Windows looks quite different to iTunes 4. After the square “LCD display” and the lack of a wide window border, the third difference I noticed was the combined menu- and title-bar.

Immediately, this prompted a horrible flashback to Netscape 8's appearance and wondering why they'd done it. After a few seconds I realised they'd cleverly incorporated OS X's trademark menu bar, that sits right at the top of the screen in order to benefit from Fitts' law. When iTunes is maximised, its menu is right at the top of the screen - another covert demonstration to Windows users of Apple's user interface superiority.

Except that it isn't. There's a several-pixel gap between the top edge of the screen and the clickable areas of the menu items. And there's a similar gap between the window's Close button and the top-right corner of the screen. That's just stupid.

The LCD display has been improved over iTunes 4. It now affords two lines to display which song is playing - the top line is always the song's title, while the second alternates between the artist and album from which the song came. In iTunes 4, all three were shown in rotation, so the song's title wasn't always visible... which it really should be. The elapsed time is now displayed to the left of the progress meter, with the negative remaining time (or optionally the total track time) to its right. This is much more efficient than just showing one of these at once, along with a label, and taking up an entire line of the display.

Podcasts are now fully integrated with the music library, which was inevitable but meant some of my smart playlists needed augmenting to exclude them. I like the new search bar, although I'm not sure if I'll actually find it to be of any real use.

But: when in Party Shuffle, I still can't use the search box without first switching to Library view. It makes perfect sense to be able to search the Library from Party Shuffle, for example when searching for a song to add, so it's daft having the search box disabled.

And right-clicking on context menu items still doesn't work; neither does using the menu key to activate a context menu.

Insert your own summary.

Trippin'

2004-06-21T12:30:00+00:00

For those of us who don't fancy the psychological side-effects of cannabis, but want to see what all the fuss is about, I've devised the following pseudo-stonedness induction technique (PSIT):

Step one: Make sure it's dark and you're in a dark room - switch off the light if necessary

Step two: Load up the Let It Be... Naked version of Across the Universe into iTunes

Step three: Set the Visualizer to full-screen mode, press play and turn it on

Step four: Stare at the screen

Works best when suffering from sleep-deprivation.