getting exactly what you want
09.17.07 • comment • trackback
I’ve talked a lot of trash about Winamp lately, but I always admired its plugin architecture. I never wrote my own plugins, but other people wrote many. Thus, the plugin system made Winamp the ideal music player in the same way that Addons make Firefox the unbeatable web browsing solution.
iTunes, of course, supplanted Winamp on my computer with remarkable speed. My music library had grown substantially since the day I first downloaded Winamp, and iTunes was fundamentally better at managing it. Besides, the only Winamp plugin I really used was one that gave me system-wide hotkeys to control playback. Combined with Winamp’s handy popup song information display, it was perfect, but I decided that I could switch to iTunes and live without it.
No I couldn’t. After much searching, I found iTunesKeys, which grants you global hotkey functionality if you’re using iTunes on Windows. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was the only one available. The display of song information was both ugly and annoying, and I quickly turned it off. Hotkeys worked well, but the program felt hacky in general. If I quit iTunes, for instance, iTunesKeys would unceremoniously crash. Not to mention that it put a very ugly mutation of the iTunes icon in my system tray.
This brings us to my using iTunes on my Mac. The requirements are:
- Program must grant me global hotkeys to control basic song playback.
- Program must display the currently playing song onscreen in some manner, independent of the iTunes window.
- Ideally, the program should do nothing else. Butler is overkill (for now).
- I do not want to think about the program.
The answer? iMote. Global hotkeys (and other shortcut methods), plus an onscreen display that works either through its own implentation or through Growl. I prefer Growl, in fact, the Growl Applications page is where I found iMote. I would rather that iMote be a service instead of its own application, but at least it runs invisibly and, important to Item 4, I don’t have to think about it.
Problem solved. It’s good to get what you want.