Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
iTunes Album Art Feature
So I decided to finally cave in and sign up for an iTunes account, if only to enable the album art search feature. The first thing I noticed about the iTunes album art was that the art was all relatively good quality. All the images I would have found using an amazon search program, or similar sorts of applications were about half the size and quality of art from the iTunes search feature. So, I decided to erase all my album art for my collection and start fresh with the iTunes cover art search. Originally, I wrote another VB app that deletes the artwork for an entire playlist (just a quick modification to my lyrics search app). But there is a faster way:
1. Select all the songs for which you’d like to delete the album art.
2. Press Ctrl+I (or right click and show info)
3. Select the checkbox next to the blank artwork and press ok. The artwork for these tracks will be deleted.
If you already have iTunes art for most of your songs and would like to just delete the non-iTunes artwork, try this application. I modified it to just delete non-iTunes artwork.
Friday, January 25th, 2008
iTunes Tagger released!
I developed a program that will search for id3 (album, artist, etc) information for the currently selected song in itunes. Let me know if it’s working or not, or if you have any suggestions.
See it here.
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
iTunes Track Change Displayer
I’ve wrote a program tonight that displays album art and track info each time a song changes. It pops up with info for 10 seconds, then disappears. It also lets you rate the song…
I know some stuff behaves weird with it, so let me know if you experience any problems and I’ll fix it.
Friday, January 18th, 2008
iTunes Lyric Downloader (beta version)
A new beta version of the iTunes Lyric Downloader has been released. The release includes support for sing365.com lyrics, erasing existing lyrics, and fixes some known runtime errors.
Details can be found here.
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Alternatives to iTunes Lyric Downloader
So, it turns out theres a couple programs out there that already perform the same task that mine has been written to do:
- The iTunes lyrics importer is a simple application written in C# to import lyrics for the songs in your iTunes, using the Lyricswiki’s web services.
- Doesn’t seem to support any other sites, which I may plan on doing.
- iGrabber is a Windows application that automatically downloads album art and lyrics for selected iTunes tracks.
- Same site restriction as above
- EvilLyrics has a client that supports itunes lyrics, but you need to have the program running as you listen to music. This does support various sites and I once found a script that automatically imports all your evillyrics files into iTunes. However, it is a bit of a nuisance always making sure that the program is up and running while you listen to music.
These programs all work and look better than mine at this point. As such, I’ve given up. Just kidding. I like to program, and i’ll see where this ends up. Hopefully I can fix some issues on other computers, and support some other lyrics sites, or a guitar tab site.
Other ideas:
- A script that pops up on a song change and lets you rate the track you just heard, and displays currently playing info after changing songs.
Leave any iTunes addon suggestions in the comments below.
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
iTunes Lyric Downloader (alpha release?)
I’ve decided to re-learn visual basic, and started by writing a quick program that scans for lyrics at lyricwiki.com, and will save them either to a text file or to the iTunes tag file. That would allow you to see the lyrics on your ipod video or ipod nano. See This page. Please leave a comment here if you have any success/failure stories.
