Hey all – so in case you hadn’t noticed – iTunes 9 broke the programs I had written. I’ve found the problem, and I’ve updated: itunes tagger, itunes tagger beta, and itunes lyric downloader. Let me know if you have any problems with any of these!
Lyricwiki has officially “joined the family of Wikia”. While this is great news for the future of lyricwiki (or now Wikia Music I guess), it also somehow changed the api from the old Lyricwiki.org. For those who have been following the program in recent days, you’ll know that they also had some troubles with the api and licensing deals. Anyways, I’m really hoping to find that the api is up and running again sometime in the near future. However, I do have an interim solution for you here. This just mashes together a url based on itunes artist and title info. As such, it will certainly NOT find all the lyrics you’re looking for. It will not work well with special symbols like question marks and semicolons. But it might help you find some lyrics where you didn’t have them before.
[Download Itunes Lyric Downloader (SANS API)] (downloaded 2131 times)
UPDATE: now works with iTunes 9!
Some people have noticed that my lyric downloading program stopped working, and that was due to this announcement by lyricwiki.org.
The good news is that I originally wrote the program without the api service, using simple html calls. As such, I’ve revised the program so it works once again. Hopefully it works for you!
Thanks to Karsten, it’s been smooth sailing implementing lyricwiki’s SOAP with the lyrics downloader. I’ve also made the program save a “notfound.txt” file for those of you wanting to know what wasn’t saved.
With the recent release of itunes 8 and it’s built in genius feature, it would seem that my work on similar playlist creation has become outdated. However, there is one thing that genius lacks: a feature that allows exploration of similar music apart from my own collection. Of course, there are suggestions from the itunes store, and I can preview 30 seconds from each of these songs, but that’s not always a good indication of whether I’ll like the song or not. So I decided to write a quick little program to combine the features of last.fm’s similar tracks functionality and seeqpod’s playable search. Here’s the result. It’s ugly, but it’s functional (as far as I’ve tested it). As always, interest will dictate how much additional work goes into the program.
Requires .Net framework
To run the program, unzip the folder, run the .exe file, and select a track in itunes. Then click on the “Generate List” button to start listening to new music!
With the recently released iTunes 8.0, it seems that my itunes tagger app’s similar playlist functionality isn’t a big priority anymore. While I sometimes like the results from last.fm’s similar tracks better than itunes’, having Genius built into itunes is just a lot more convenient.
The one thing iTunes is still (surprisingly) missing is automatic lyrics downloading. A while back I wrote a quick program to find some lyrics from lyricwiki and sing365, but it has since become terribly outdated and provided no relevant results. And since I still get a couple hits a day for that program, I thought I’d update it for y’all.
The itunes last.fm tagger program has been updated. The old beta version has replaced the current itunes tagger program, and there is a new beta program on this page. The beta version has a couple cool new features that you might want to check out, including faster tagging, last.fm tag submissions, and similar tracks playlist generating.
Alright, so it’s all out there in the open now. If you download it, it’ll probably be the worst coding you’ve seen. But maybe some people can fix that? We shall see. Anyways, have fun folks. Just goes to show that if enough people ask for open source, they’ll get it.
Sidenote: I love open source and all it stands for. And I know it took me a while, but I really wanted to write this one by my lonesome, as it’s my first ever program that’s actually starting to be useful. But, I can see a lot of potential here as well, so it’s time to let it run free 
I’ve just put together a new beta release of itunes tagger. It includes a couple really exciting features, which took a little bit more coding under the hood, but I think it was worth it.
I just finished updating the last.fm tagger. It actually wasn’t too bad finishing it off in vb.net. I’ll be looking to add some other features to the program in the near future. Leave a comment if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to see.