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Apple Releases iTunes SDK for Windows
amichalo writes "Apple's recent release of an iTunes SDK for Windows provides the ability for third party programs, such as WinAmp and Windows Media Player, to support the AAC file format. Ars Technica has additional commentary. The SDK uses the COM interface and supports iTunes 4.5 only."
The original goal of the iPod was to drive Mac sales, although perhaps things are a bit upside down now. This SDK goes a long way, though not far enough, toward opening the iTunes music store and keeping the iPod (and therefore Apple) relevant.
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
Not that I have any myself, but there are a ton of radio stations that broadcast in WMA that I can't import into iTunes (you can add new stations into iTunes by copying any station into a playlist, and then editing the URL of the copy in the playlist. The new station only shows up in a playlist, instead of the Radio area, but good enough!).
So when is iTunes going to support ogg, flac, and shn thanks to or without the use of this of this SDK?
I started using it last month over Winamp and kinda miss those capabilities... and where do you let it allow songs to flow into one another without pause? Is that option in the program?
First of all, there is already an iTMS input plugin for Winamp. It has been around for some time. It uses the existing QuickTime SDK to play the music.
This new SDK has nothing to do with that. Now, I haven't exactly had much time to review it, so I could be wrong, but what this new SDK looks like is scripting support for manipulating the iTunes interface. For instance, you can write scripts which build playlists, tag files, etc. Basically, this allows you to automate tasks that you might otherwise perform through the iTunes UI.
On Mac OSX, such functionality has been available via AppleScript for some time. In fact, many OSX programs expose functionality like this via AppleScript -- a practice I wish were more widespread on other systems.
Of course, Windows doesn't have AppleScript, but it does have COM, which I guess can be used in vaguely similar ways. So, they have exposed all this functionality via COM instead. The download includes some example scripts written in Javascript for creating playlists, removing dead files, etc. Of course, since it's COM, you can use pretty much any language you want to access it (including C/C++, though I wouldn't recommend it for this sort of thing).
Kudos to Apple for doing this. They could have been snotty and kept the scripting abilities exclusive to OSX, but they instead chose to support both platforms equally.
But, no, I don't think Winamp or WMP have anything to gain from this. Sorry.
Has anyone downloaded the SDK?
.C file, and a 406KB .H file.
:-) Is anything in iTunes not scriptable?
It consists of just two files, plus documentation and samples.
The two files are a 4KB
Yes, 406KB. Good lord, that's one big header!
n/t
The Mozilla people need to scrap everything and start busting ass on *Calendar apps* - not sidebar music apps.
Sorry, I'm just frustrated because Mozilla Calendar really does lack basic features that users have come to expect from Outlook's calendar (even without Exchange)
Ugh. No more themes & silly crap. Focus!!
Or if you're curious about COM on Mac OS X:
Component Object Model (COM) Development on Mac OS X
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Slashdot | AAC vs OGG vs MP3
I may be mistaken but doesn't this mean that you can control ITunes remotely using DCOM.....
iTunes 4.5 supports importing unprotected WMA files. You can import unprotected WMA files into an iTunes format of your choice, and play them on your iPod.
While this won't help with playing DRM'd WMA files purchased from other online stores, it's a step in the right direction.
Maybe someone out there will make a hymn-like program for unprotecting DRM'd WMA music purchases...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Realnetworks wish has come true? This SDK is good for streaming too?
Real was speaking about moving to Dolby formats from Sony Atrac3 (I bet Sony itself too).
how about all the "SDK's for crackers" Apple is releasing lately with amazing speed ... looks like they wanna challenge Microsoft in all respects
like this one for example
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It's nice to see Apple recognizing their roots and giving back to the community that helped them create OSX?
WTF? Where's the love Steve?
People wouldn't have to 'illegally' be reverse enginineering your products if you would just let us USE THEM?!
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Real wanted to get in on the Protected AAC thing behind the scenes as a provider of content. As has already been mentioned, this SDK is nothing to do with AAC at all (that functionality is already provided by the QuickTime SDK, this is merely for controlling/scripting iTunes' GUI).
The QuickTime SDK merely allows you to play a Protected AAC music file to a given sound output device as a client of the system (which remains a proprietary black box). Not what Real wants at all.
Now, if only they released iTunes for Win98!
Hewlett-Packard will soon be marketing its own hp-branded mp3 players based on iPod technology that will utilize iTunes. Perhaps HP, being a Windows PC provider, will utilize the Windows Media 9 Series SDK and add WMA support to iTunes.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Winamp 5.x already supports AAC out of the "box"; it will rip to AAC quite transparently.
Check it out... www.winamp.com; its worth it for the shoutcast capabilities alone.
edit--preferences--effects--crossfade playback. set it to a short time.
Finally, they're learning their lesson from the original Mac vs PC battle for market share =)
Can you specify exactly what your problem is? I find iTunes to be a fucking ninja with ID3 tags, so I'm curious.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Now I can create an icon for the taskbar that will make it easy to control iTunes. This is how their icon should work now, but doesn't:
Single-click: toggle play/pause (update icon when paused).
Double-click: next song in playlist.
Right-click: context sensitive menu (same as now).
Hover: Display tooltip with album artwork and other information, including info on next track in list.
Obviously these should be user-configurable actions, but those defaults would be nice.
Then if they'd let me hide the program in the taskbar when minimized, I'd be all set.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Who will be the first to get a webserver interface created for iTunes?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Though the header files, etc, are nice if you're a VC++ whiz, any two-bit Visual Basic 6 hacker like myself has had access to the iTunes COM objects for quite some time.
Not only do you not need the SDK, aside from the sample code (strangely written in jscript of all things), the SDK is nearly worthless for VB6 hackers. All you had to do was open a new project in the VB6 IDE, select Project==References from the menus, and select iTunes 1.0 Type Library (the file is iTunes.exe no less).
Voila. Instant COM compliant objects waiting for you to hack0rz. Hit F2 and search for iTunesLib and the documentation's already there (no SDK required) as well.
If this SDK makes you aware you can hack iTunes, then great. But don't wait to download it to start hacking. Install iTunes, open VB6's IDE, and get a move on!
To stick in a horrible Wizard of Oz (but thankfully not a Zardoz reference, I suppose), you've been wearing the ruby red slippers (or whatever) the whole time. "There's no place like ~. There's no place like ~."
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
AAC, don't they mean M4P??
=1000101
Instead of screwing up iTunes with more bloat and features, Apple releases an SDK so Windows users can do it themselves! Brilliant!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
what are you talking about?
Preferences -> Advanced -> keep iTunes music folder organized
i do that and my MP3 directory (that is just a partition on a second drive) is organized as:
Artist/Album/Song
what more do you need than that? last time i looked at a friend's winamp MP3 directory it was every MP3 file sorted by the file's name ALL in one huge directory.
I cooked up a script that converts all iTunes playlists to M3U playlists to import into Winamp in the case of a migration attempt.
Hopefully this doesn't cause too much of a karma burn seeing that iTunes appears to be the preferred player around here.
If you dl it and try it out, it's just a scripting SDK for the iTunes interface (I think someone else pointed this out as well). I downloaded it...fired up Visual Studio and build a quick Windows app with a button to create a new playlist.
Click the button and watch as iTunes opens up. In fact, aside from instantiation of the iTunes object, there isn't a single function that I've been able to perform without iTunes opening up.
Not saying it isn't pretty cool...but the COM interface isn't going to let you build tons of plugins, etc. without iTunes running on your desktop.
Karma: Non-existant. Due mostly to the fact that you smell funny and nobody likes you.
I wonder if this will allow the Slim Devices' Slim Server to have the necessary hooks to stream DRMed iTunes songs? Their FAQ states that Apple has not provided hooks to stream protected files. Slim Server was developed for their Sqeezebox, but the server software is open source and will stream just about anything you throw at it. Good stuff.
?SYNTAX ERROR IN SIG
READY.
Well, it's not direct, but under OS X you can set up things like RadioRecorder
I haven't looked closely so I don't know if it specifically works on WMA streams, but there are an awful lot of stream recorders out there, and then there's EasyWMA to convert to mp3.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
with XMMS or Beep? I've been trying with no luck so far.
Prefer Debian but any help would be good.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Would this help in allowing my SLIMP3 to play these files?
...and that is exactly the property that lossy codecs exploit. What do you use to listen to your music, your ears, or a frequency analyzer?
"Better" in the realm of lossy encoding means "sounds closer to the original to a human," not has less binary differences, has a more similar waveform, has a more similar frequency fingerprint, etc.
You have half a point that non-trained ears can skew the result of public listening tests, but double-blind tests have been done with highly-trained ears also, generally with much the same results. And there is a remarkable amount of correlation between independent double-blind tests.
But at the end of the day the best, most relevant, double-blind tests are the ones you do yourself, with the music you like to listen to... This will tell you a lot more than a frequency analyser.
After all, if you can hear what a frequency analyser is telling you, you'll be able to hear it in a double-blind test... Right?
RealPlayer 10 has supported AAC since it's release... just FYI. :-)
Did you even *read* the article? Apparently not... for as you state ActiveX is not supported (and rightly so, what would Windows GUI objects do for you on Mac OS X), but distributed use of COM IS supported. In fact, the client-server example on the OReilly web page is exactly that!
I don't see where the Apple SDK has an API for porting my WinAmp plugins to work in the iTunes app. Do you?
--
make install -not war
play and encode AACs. I think the advantage gained here is the possibility of playing fairplay DRMed AACs that have been purchased with iTunes.
I see the JScript examples in the SDK, but I'd really like to write my program in Java instead of C#/C++/etc. Can someone point me in the right direction for how to do this? Thanks so much.