A web interface to iTunes

This is a webapp, written to be run on a Mac alongside iTunes. It
exposes a library and playlist browser, and basic controls for
playing and queuing up tracks. It’s intended for use in an
office-like environment, for democratising control of what music
is played, or for inciting bitter, hateful infighting.

It’s currently on development hiatus, because I ran across a
pretty major stumbling block—specifically, tracks on remote
shares can’t be queued locally using an iTunes playlist. This
means enabling queuing of remotely shared music would necessitate
either some unpleasant hack such as copying it to the local
library first, managing the upcoming tracks using some other
method than a native iTunes playlist, or some other solution I
haven’t yet hit upon. Without this ability, however, it’s no good
for my particular use case.

I’ve released it to the world on the offchance that someone else
would like to help out and/or adopt it. Some fun features to add
would include the standard play/pause/next/previous controls and
somehow slurping in iTunes’ graphics to enhance the look-and-feel.

Running it

Firstly, this is Mac-only. Sorry.

Ramaze and RubyOSA are required. They can be installed by typing:

That done, make sure iTunes is running, then cd to the application
directory and type:

Point your browser to http://localhost:7000/ and the fun begins.
The port can be configured in start.rb.

Acknowledgements

Ramaze is a nice little web server. Though it looks like Merb is going
to win in the “Ruby not Rails” department. Sorry about that guys.

RubyOSA is amazing.

I am Aanand Prasad ([email protected]).