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iTuner Advanced iTunes Mini Player

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:36:56 +0000

The standard iTunes Mini Player offers basic playback controls in a small window which is handy for computer users who do not have the screen estate to display the iTunes window all the time. It obviously does not offer all the features on the other hand that iTunes offers. Enter iTuner, an advanced third party alternative to iTunes’ Mini Player.

The program is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system and requires iTunes to be running in the background to function at all.

It will automatically pick up the songs that are played in iTunes offering additional controls in its interface. These controls include rating songs, toggling shuffle and displaying lyrics that are pulled from the Internet.

Those features alone would probably convince only a few computer users to give the application a try. But what about global keyboard shortcuts, automated library maintenance and optimization, synchronization of playlists with USB mp3 players, playlist export, conversion of iTunes tracks into other supported music formats, copying of tracks to other locations, import of media files into the iTunes library or notification popups that show information about the track that has just been loaded?

The iTuner application offers many interesting features that are either not provided by iTunes natively or only accessible through several clicks in the iTunes software.

The program uses on the downside lots of computer resources while running (120 Megabytes on our Windows 7 test system). Windows users who want to test the program can download it from its Codeplex website.

Take Keyboard Control Of iTunes With iTunes Media Keys

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:31:59 +0000

We covered iTunes Media Keys about two month ago. The software made it possible to control iTunes with some keyboard shortcuts even if iTunes was minimized. The verdict back then was that it did work quite well but missed customization and options. The software developer did promise a new version and released a new version of the software yesterday.

Version 1.2 of iTunes Media Keys adds the option to select the hotkeys to perform the various actions. Several new actions have been added which can be used to rate songs, forward or rewind them.

The software will add the shortcuts as system wide shortcuts. All that needs to be done to use the software is run it in the background.

The software itself uses less than 1 Megabytes of computer memory while running but about 12 Megabytes of virtual memory, still acceptable for heavy iTunes users. The software requires an installation of the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5. Should run fine on most Microsoft operating systems.

Control iTunes Playback With Shortcuts

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:25:58 +0000

If you like to listen to music in iTunes you might have noticed that iTunes does not provide keyboard shortcuts to control the playback when iTunes is running in the background. Other music players like Winamp or AIMP provide that feature which might be interesting for many users.

The developer of iTunes Media Keys released a public alpha version of his software. The software adds global shortcuts which can be used to control the playback in iTunes.

To be more precise it adds four shortcuts that can be used to play / pause, stop and to switch to the next and previous track. The default shortcuts are assigned to [Shift UP, DOWN, RIGHT or LEFT]. It did also recognize a Logitech media keyboard and changed the shortcuts automatically to the media keys instead.

The developer plans to add additional features to his software program like being able to rate songs and better hotkey integration.