Has anyone done a plugin or asp interface with Itune

[rkato]

I was wondering if anyone has interface HS with Itunes, Yes I know it an APPLE product but it has great file/playlist management please let me know

itunes
they also have a sdk adv:sdk

iTunes Visual Plug-ins SDK for Windows
This SDK contains the files necessary for iTunes Visual Plug-ins development for iTunes for Windows, and includes documentation and sample code. Specifically, this SDK contains "iTunesAPI.h", "iTunesVisualAPI.h", and "iTunesAPI.c" that developers will use to develop their own Plug-ins. This Windows SDK includes a sample project for Visual Studio 6. [Oct 16 2003]

[This message was edited by rkato on Mon, 16 February 2004 at 12:55 AM.]

[jayell]

Or has anyone found a way to run itunes through the command line ?

J

[MeSteve]

BUMP

I was just wondering if anyone was still looking into this or if it was just written off.

[picta]

Or has anyone found a way to run itunes through the command line ?

J

I link iTunes to HS via the slimserver http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_features.html

works great and has elaborate command line and html interface.

[zimmer62]

rkato: What excatly would you like the plugin to do?

I've found you need the com sdk, not the visualation sdk link that you posted.
http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunescomsdk.html

I've quickly tested to see if it's something I can write, It looks like accessing some things should be really easy

play, stop, pause etc... would be easy to implement.

[MeSteve]

I resurrected this post. I was just looking for the regular types of controls. Maybe some playlist support and party shuffle. The podcasts seem kinda cool, havent really looked at them yet, but a neat idea.

[zimmer62]

sorry for not reading the origonal date of the messages, I missed the part about it being bumped up.

Last night I played around with the SDK a little bit, I got play, stop, rewind, pause, fastward etc... those features working great, and could make a plugin fairly easily...

I started to look into the playlist and I'm not sure exactly what is useful.

I was thinking about having homeseer know about the different user created playlists, and being able to start one of those up, maybe even by voice command

computer
yes sire?
play itunes playlist music to sleep to

seems reasonable.

I'm not sure about asking for any particular song, it's probably doable but the more voice commands you add to homeseer, the worse it recognizes you. So having every song and every artist just as a homeseer voice command would be a problem. But you could do something like this

computer
yes sire?
play itunes artist
which artist do you want to play?

replace artist with genre, song, album etc. Then build the vr list dynamicaly at that point.

I'll look into it sometime this week and see if I can get something going. I've been thinking about writing something similar for Yahoo Music Engine too, so maybe I can write a dual purpose music plugin

[MeSteve]

Don't kill yourself on the artist, album, etc. on my account. The party shuffle playlist would be good enough. The playlists I was refering to were the dynamic ones that are already included like the 25 most played,etc. Thanks.

[zimmer62]

well on my dev machine, I was able to list the current playlist and get them started.

Shouldn't take that long to write the plugin, but I guess that's going to be some figuring out since I havn't make a plugin for public purposes yet.

How do think we should initiate the playlists

Events? with device action, choose the itunes device and start playlist with a list of playlists?

I'm still exploring the best way for homeseer to interface to this.

[Rupp]

Couldn't this been done with a simple script rather than a plugin?

[MeSteve]

How do think we should initiate the playlists

I don't think VR is needed, an en user can always create an event to do that if they are a VR user. I would think an event or device action would be easiest.

Rupp,

What would be the benefit of using a script, other than the obvious end-user flexibility? Are there any inherant benefits of using a plug-in over a script?

[Rupp]

A script would allow all users to "add to" the development and it's as simple as a drop in. There's nothing wrong with plugins but there are times when a script works just as well.

[zimmer62]

rupp, a script would work, however a plugin is going to be nicer, if your an itunes user, check out what I have so far.

Put this in your hs2 directory, there's no way this will work with 1.7...

Add an event, select device action and choose itunes play playlist

you'll get a dropdown list of your playlists, select one, save and run the event.

This is VERY rough at this point and I need some time to refine how this is going to work. Right now, make sure you have iTunes running before you load up homeseer.

Joe

UPDATE! : Follow this thread down, there is a newer version

[polycron]

Very nice. It works fine with version 6 of iTunes.

[zimmer62]

I'm going to try and get more functionality in there soon, what features are most important to people?

I wouldn't get too crazy adding events just yet, I was only posting that to show what I had in mind. I think it's likely to undergo quite a few changes before I'd consider using it.

Play, stop, next track, previous track, pause I think are next, as they are very important, I'm not sure if I'll do those as even actions as well yet.

I think I'll also put in triggers for player state (paused, playing etc)

What about having virtual devices showing the current playlist, current track, current album, artist etc... what fields are important to you?

iTunes SDK seems a ton easier to work with then the YME plugin I'm also trying to work with.