iTunes

[Pullmyfinger]

Just started trying out iTunes today, mostly for the feature that lets me share music over LAN with co-workers, saving lots of hard drive space, pretty cool and all, but there are some features that I really miss from winamp and WMP. Perhaps some of you know of some workarounds.

1.- I like how iTunes works with my keyboard's play, stop, next, prev, etc. keys, but it won't work when minimized to system tray. Any workarounds?

2.- Album art, my music was ripped with WMP and it gave me album art files, but iTunes won't display them, I can drag and drop but I have to do it to every song individually and asks me for an account to search for art. Any known plug-ins?

Any help is greatly appreciated

[Mozgus]

Just started trying out iTunes today, mostly for the feature that lets me share music over LAN with co-workers, saving lots of hard drive space, pretty cool and all, but there are some features that I really miss from winamp and WMP. Perhaps some of you know of some workarounds.

1.- I like how iTunes works with my keyboard's play, stop, next, prev, etc. keys, but it won't work when minimized to system tray. Any workarounds?

2.- Album art, my music was ripped with WMP and it gave me album art files, but iTunes won't display them, I can drag and drop but I have to do it to every song individually and asks me for an account to search for art. Any known plug-ins?

Any help is greatly appreciated

Never used it, but does it have any kind of global hotkey function? Meaning, any combination of keys that can control your music even when minimized? Thats how the keyboard media keys usually function, by emulating global hotkeys.

[GSZX1337]

iTunes = bleh

[racketboy]

I used to be a Winamp junkie, but now I love iTunes
The whole smart playlist feature is like making SQL queries against a well-tagged library.
The newest versions of iTunes have an ability to grab cover artwork for you if you have the albums tagged properly and that album is sold in the iTunes store.
There are other utilities that grab cover art from Amazon.

[Pullmyfinger]

Actually, they all have the artwork when played in media player, as most of my music is ripped from original cds, but apparently iTunes uses another format or something and it would not do a search unless I have an iTunes store account.

I used winamp a lot too, but iTunes lets me play music from co-worker's computers easily, so that way I don't have to store everything in mine.

[lordofduct]

I use iTunes... not a big fan, but it's just as good as most of the others. I swear I've yet to find a audio player that is any good yet so far in my life.

Anyways:
Just create a iTunes store account, you don't need to give a credit card or anything. It's like creating a username here on racketboy or any other community. It's just for logging in.

There are TONS of plugins for things like searching different databases for album art, along with plugins to do numerous other things like removing music from your iPod (instead of the really annoying backdoor in Windows) and other junk.

Your having a hard time playing music off the network with other programs like windows media player? In those other programs all you need to do is make sure that they have their music in a shared folder, and then you just type in the address of that shared folder when you go to add folder (in any program, not just iTunes).

The folder would be something like \\NameOfComputer\NameOfRootSharedFolder\directory

For instance with a computer on your workgroup named Comp011, with a shared root of MyDocuments you can get their MyMusic like this: \\Comp011\MyDocuments\MyMusic\

If you did this with Windows Media Player it would solve your album art problem too because A) it already works on your local drive, and B) it would load all album art from the shared folder of your peer's computer too as long as it is in the same directory as the music.

...

That or you could go they even more stable route of mounting network drives. I have a server here at home with a shared partition that is mounted on all other computers in the house. This gives the network drive a letter like your local disks and can be accessed just like your HDD or CD-ROM. Shit you can even install programs to them this way
(as long as your not on Vista... Vista hates network drives, it considers them security risks. Annoys the hell out of me because I always download stuff directly to my Server because I surf the web with a remote desktop account to the server. And I then have to copy the stupid executeable over to my Vista machine to run it. ughhhhh)