iTunes Companion

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iTunes Companion © 2003-2008 Knut August Johansen Main functions iTunes Companion is a Yahoo! Widget Engine Widget that searches for album cover art for your current iTunes track at amazon.com and downloads it to your hard drive. The cover art is displayed on a jewel case with a slide in/out effect. It can save the artworks to iTunes, so you can watch them on your iPod. Searches for lyrics at three lyrics sites. Displays the lyrics in a drawer or in a separate resizeable window. Saves the lyrics to iTunes, so you can watch them on your iPod. Sing-along function. Control iTunes with play, pause, fast forward, rewind. Toggle shuffle on/of. Track rating. Volume control. Shows tracks on current album, albums by currrent artist, all artists in your library and playlists. All clickable. Display/edit tags. Fall asleep/wake up to music. Keep track of everything you play. Publish cover art , track info and links to the iTunes Store as an html page to a web server. Customizable hotkeys. Bring widget to front and display track info on track change. Get cover art and lyrics while listening to streaming radios. Contextual menu with options to buy the current album at Amazon or to visit the iTunes Store for more music by the current artist. Shows concert schedule for the current artist. Shows the cover art in the Widget Dock. Three sizes to choose from. See the illustration below for the location of most of the controls. The controls are visible when you move the cursor over the cover art. Click on the arrow in the upper left corner of the control panel to open the drawer. The tracks on the current album are listed. If the text is too long to fit in the drawer, rest the mouse over the text and it will scroll. Click on a track that you want to play. Click on the CDs icon to show all albums by current artist in your library sorted alphabetically. When you click on an album, it plays the first track on that album. Click on the people icon to show all artists in your library sorted alphabetically. When you click on an artist, it will play the first track on the first album by that artist. When you click on the Library/Playlist button and click on a Library/Playlist, all the tracks in that Library/Playlist are listed. Shift-click to have the list sorted alphabetically. Artwork The images are stored in a folder named "CDCovers" in "Pictures" in your home directory. First it searches your hard drive: the CDCovers folder, the iTunes Library and the folder where the music track is located. If no artwork was found there, it searches at amazon.com and downloads the artwork to your hard drive. The image is only downloaded once. The next time you play the track it finds the image on your hard drive. If the search at amazon fails or you only get part of the image, you can search amazon manually from the contextual menu. When an image is found at amazon.com a "Dismiss" button appears on the cover art. Click on this button if the image isn’t the right one. If you don't click on it, the warning will fade out after the number of seconds you have set in Preferences (15 seconds by default) and the artwork will be saved. You can also dismiss the cover art later from the contextual menu, and you can set it to delete images in iTunes as well. If no image is available at amazon.com, you can click on the jewel case or choose "Search with Google" from the contextual menu to search with Google, or you can scan the album cover yourself. Drag and drop an image file over the jewel case and it will be properly named and copied to the CDCovers folder. Export artwork to iTunes You can set it to save the artwork to the track's ID3 tag in Preferences. It is off by default. Scan entire library You can also scan your entire library in one go without the need to play anything. Control click on the Widget to bring up the contextual menu and choose "Scan entire library". You can stop the scanning at any time by clicking on the "Stop" button. If you want to continue to scan the library after it has been stopped, choose "Scan from where it last stopped/you stopped it". Three sizes Click in the upper left corner of the jewel case to increase/decrease the size. If you are using it in the smallest size and the text is unreadable, open System Preferences and the Appearance preference pane. Set "Turn off font smoothing for font sizes" to 6 and smaller. Lyrics You can set it to download lyrics automatically in Preferences. If you turn this on, lyrics are also saved into iTunes automatically. You can also search for lyrics manually. Click on the Lyrics button in the drawer. Click on the Search button to search for lyrics. You must click on the Save button to save the lyrics if you search for lyrics manually. You can edit the lyrics before you save it. If the search was unsuccessful, you can click on the Google button to search with Google and copy lyrics from the web page and paste it into the lyrics field. When you paste in text, the lyrics field does not update immediately. Click on the Save button and the lyrics field should be updated. An alternative method for pasting in the lyrics is to shift-click on the Save button. If you want to delete lyrics, just select all text (Mac: Command-A, Windows: Ctrl-A), press the delete key and click on Save. Shift-click on the Save button to paste the clipboard content into the lyrics field. Lyrics auto scroll Hold the shift key down while you move the cursor over the lyrics text area to reveal the auto scroll control panel. Lyrics in a separate window There is also an option in Preferences to display the lyrics in a separate resizeable window: Sing-along The "Sing-along function makes it possible to have the words in the lyrics field highlighted as they are sung during playback. Before it can do that, the lyrics must be synchronized with the song. How to sync lyrics: Bring up the separate Lyrics window if it's not open (contextual menu item "Show lyrics for this track…"). Play a track you have the lyrics for or search for lyrics. The lyrics you get from the Internet are not 100% correct all the time, so you may need to do some corrections to the lyrics. Click on the "Sync" button. A window with instructions will appear. Click on one of the buttons in that window. The song will start to play from the beginning. You must press the space bar for each word you hear during playback. Don't worry if you're not getting it absolutely right. When you have pressed the space bar for the last word, a window will appear where you can adjust the synchronization: (You can also bring up this window later by choosing "Adjust lyrics synchronization…" in the contextual menu.) The "Adjust Synchronization" window can be resized in the horizontal direction (it's not possible to resize it while it's playing). Click on the three dots on the right side and drag to resize. The track can be played in normal speed or in half speed. Toggle the speed by clicking on the "Speed" button (it's not possible to change the speed while it's playing). Click on the play button and see if it needs any adjustments. (You can also toggle play/pause by pressing the space bar). You can click in the ruler or click and drag the position marker to navigate the song. If no adjustment is needed (most unlikely), you can just close the "Adjust Synchronization" window. The synchronization data has already been saved. If you want to make adjustments, click and drag the words left/right to match the song. When you are finished, you can close the "Adjust Synchronization" window. If you have made any adjustments, you are asked if you want to save the changes. You can also save the changes by clicking on the "Save" button if you want to see how it is before you close the window. In the lyrics window you will see that a button with a microphone icon has appeared. That means the song is synchronized. If you click on this button, the song starts to play from the beginning, and the words are highlighted as they are sung. If you are not satisfied, you can go back to the "Adjust Synchronization" window and do some more adjustments. Sing-along When a song is synchronized, you'll see a new button (microphone icon) in the lyrics window. If you click on that button the song starts from the beginning and the words are highlighted according to how you synchronized it. To turn it off, click on the button again. If you click on the "+" button in the lyrics window, the window will fill the screen height and the font size is set according to your setting in Preferences. Click on the "-" button to set it back to normal size. Display/Edit tags The current track's tags (info and options) can be displayed/edited in the drawer: Fall asleep/wake up to music. To fall asleep to music: Bring up the contextual menu (ctrl-click on the Widget), choose "Set stop time…" and type in number of minutes before you want it to stop playing. You can drag the slider to increase/decrease the time to fade out the music afterwards. On the Mac you can also set it to put the computer to sleep afterwards. The time left is displayed on top of the cover art: You can click on the time to stop the timer. To wake up to music: Choose "Tune clock" in Preferences. If you check for "Start/wake up the computer if it's shut down/asleep" (Mac), you must type in your password. The computer will start/wake up four minutes before it starts to play.Choose a playlist from where it picks a random track to play. Statistics It can display which tracks, artists or albums you have played at any given date or period (after you have turned it on in Preferences). Open the top drawer: Publish Publish cover art , track info and links to the iTunes Store as an html page to a web server. Turn it on in the Internet preference pane. Only one template is available at the moment, but you can make your own. Here you can see how the template looks like. You can modify it, use it as it is and/or copy it into an existing html page. If you don't want to display any of the track, artist, album, rating, play count, jewel case or the cover art change their styles from visibility:visible to visibility:hidden. If you use the built-in template you get a page like this: How to make your own custom html template: It's simple. Just make a regular html file and put: <img src="<<imageURL>>" border="0" /> where you want to display the cover art. <img src="<<stars>> border="0" /> where you want to display your rating. <<track>> where you want to display name of track. <<artist>> where you want to display artist's name. <<album>> where you want to display name of album. <<playCount>> where you want to display play count. If you also want to display the jewel case, see how I have done that in in the template. If you want to include links to the iTunes Store: Link to track: <a href="itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?songTerm=<<songTerm>>&artistTerm=<<artistTerm>>"><img src="itmsarrow.jpg" alt="" height="12" width="12" border="0" /></a> Link to artist: <a href="itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=<<artistTerm>>"><img src="itmsarrow.jpg" alt="" height="12" width="12" border="0" /></a> Link to album: <a href="itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearchResults?artistTerm=<<artistTerm>>&albumTerm=<<albumTerm>>"><img src="itmsarrow.jpg" alt="" height="12" width="12" border="0" /></a> Download Version 6.6 can be downloaded here: Mac: http://homepage.mac.com/knut/filechute/iTunes%20Companion.widget Windows: http://homepage.mac.com/knut/filechute/iTunes%20Companion-win.zip Troubleshooting It's been a while since I updated this Widget. In the meantime the lyrics fetching has stopped working and there are some other problems with the current version. I have uploaded a new version to the Gallery, but it may take some time before it appeares there. In the meantime you can download it here (see above). Mac There is a problem with Konfabulator 4.5 for Mac, which sometimes makes it stop responding when the computer has been asleep for a while. Solution: Command-click on iTunes Companion i the Widgets Dock to restart it. If you are using it in the smallest size and the text is unreadable, open System Preferences and the Appearance preference pane. Set "Turn off font smoothing for font sizes" to 6 and smaller. Windows: Version 6.0 does not work properly on Windows. I use a few UNIX commands in my widget, and because Windows is not based on UNIX, some Unix Utils are necessary for it to function on Windows. Unfortunately they are no longer part of the installer package in Yahoo! Widget Engine 4.0. I believed they would package the Unix Utils with Widgets that needed them. The necessary Unix Utllity is included in vers. 6.0.1. If iTunes Companion won't load after you have updated iTunes. Try to uninstall iTunes and do a fresh install. One user reported that he fixed the "Unable to load…" problem by uninstalling the Yahoo! Widget Engine and downloaded and installed the engine again. (Even though it says your copy of the engine is up to date, it could be that a newer version is available). If iTunes Companion has stopped working after you have updatet to the latest iTunes, try this: Close iTunes Companion. Click on Start -> Run… In the next window type* "cmd" and press Enter In the next window type "cd" and the path to iTunes. It's normally located in the Program Files directory, so you type: "cd C:\Program Files\iTunes" Press Enter and type: "iTunes/regserver" Press Enter * (do not type the quotation marks) ••• iTunes Companion is donationware. I made it because I wanted such a Widget myself and I have been happy to share it with others for free for more than three years. But it takes more and more of my time, and since I'm self-employd, I can't justify spending so much time on it without getting something back. Especially since I started to make a Windows version (which I have no use of myself) as well. I need money to live too. So if you are enjoying this Widget and want me to develop it further, please make a small (or large ) contribution. After you have donated you won't see the nag window anymore for all future versions. Any amount qualifies for this - it's your choice (although less than $1 is pointless because of the PayPal fee I have to pay). If you want to donate, please click on the button below. You can rely on PayPal as a well established, safe and simple way to transfer money. PayPal accepts Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express, as well as electronic checks, debit cards, and PayPal account balances. You don't need to sign up for a PayPal account. Enjoy!