I use Macs all day at work, but not at all in the evenings at home. I also don't have the most time to spend during the day to checking out iTunes when I have plenty of other software of our own to test. So I'm hoping some other people can help to test Hijack's playlist downloading and streaming features.

I've told Mark that playlists don't get displayed with any info but FID# when sent to iTunes through IE 5.5 under Mac OS 9.2.2 and IE 5.1 under Mac OS X 10.1.2. He's trying to get this working, but as of the latest Hijack (192) it still had the same problem.

If anyone would be able to test this on either Mac OS, but with some other browsers, like Netscrape, Opera, Mozilla and OmniWeb, that would be really helpful. If Mark makes any changes this weekend, trying out IE would also be cool - I won't be able to try it again until Monday.

Bruno

Speaking of which, I nuked the tweaks I'd been trying out in 191/192. v193 is out now, with fixes for a couple of bugs, and with the experiments removed again.

For the iTunes, I think I'll just have to rearrange the URLs in the m3u playlist, such that they use the track names somehow. First attempt at this had no effect (v192) according to Bruno.

The problem is that iTunes does NOT use the EXTM3U info supplied by Hijack that everything else seems to use. Oh well.

I'll have another go at it soon.

Cheers

FWIW, I use Macs and noticed the same behavior with iTunes. So, I'll be anxious to test any new tweaks once they get back in to Hijack

Okay, here's attempt number 2 for helping iTunes playlists.

Hijack v194 is out, the only real changes being (1) all references to "beta10" have been changed to "beta11" (no real difference, but a lot of newbies seemed very confused..), and (2) the .m3u playlist format now uses artist-tune in the file names.

Let me know if it has any effect (or not) on iTunes.

Cheers

-ml

all references to "beta11" have been changed to "beta10"

Wont this just confuse them more?


Z~

Okay, try again with v194, please.

Err.. yeah.. (oops)

This does show the names in the iTunes window. The names have underscores for spaces until such time as it actually loads the file and gets the real tags, however.

Could you perhaps URL encode the spaces (%20) when building the .m3u file?

Oh good! Since we now know it works, I'll take the time/effort to recode non-alphanum's in %xx format (not just the spaces).

I wonder if that will break iTunes again?

Cheers

Actually, I think it might break. I just redid a hijack m3u by hand with the URL encoded characters, and they showed up literally in iTunes. I'll keep checking to see if I can come up with some other way for it to work.

Yep, iTunes is just about brain dead when it comes to dealing with m3u files. I couldn't figure out any way to massage the data to make it look any better, nor could I find any info on line. In light of that, I'm perfectly happy to live with underscores.

Has anyone found a way to get iTunes to just play mp3s without having to add them to the library? This is particularly annoying when playing remote playlists.

I was never able to figure out a way to have it not add to the library. So, I just changed my thinking a little bit. Instead of using the library to find and manage music, I created a bunch of playlists by artist or album, kind of like on my empeg. Then, I treat the library as the equivalent of the "all tracks" soup view on the empeg; something I only go into when necessary.

Of course, I only have a few hundred MB of music on my mac, and this organization scheme would really break with any more, since iTunes doesn't do nested playlists.

The more time I spend working in this thread, the more I become aware of the limitations of iTunes. So why do I use it? I guess because it's free, it came with the OS, it's pretty, and Apple told me to?

Okay, I'll put out v195 with the underscores for iTunes, and proper %xx for everyone else.

-ml

Can anyone confirm yet whether this is now working with Hijack v199?

Mark,

I have streaming working with Sound Jam (the precursor to iTunes) running on OS 9.2.1 as well as with iTunes running on OSX v10.1.2.

The only problems I have observed are that the song titles have underscores instead of spaces as has been discussed here and that I can NOT scan through the track. The slider bars that are normally visible for that function are not there at all. This is not the case for Winamp or for locally stored mp3 files on the Mac.

All in all it does quite well. I don't have any idea why the scanning function might not be available but if I can provide any info that would help track it down please let me know.

Lynn

Beta 11 (frought with minor problems!) and Hijack v199

Okay, good. That's how it is supposed to be working.

The underscores are a limitation of either iTunes or InternetMangler (MSIE) not translating HTTP standard %xx sequences, so Hijack feeds it underscores instead.

The lack of streaming track-seek is an iTunes limitation. I see the same limitation in XMMS (aka "LinAmp") -- it just ain't implemented there.

Cheers

Okay, I'll put out v195 with the underscores for iTunes, and proper %xx for everyone else.

Mark,

I just got around to retesting this with iTunes 3 (new since this thread was last discussed), and it no longer has this problem. To be more specific, it properly handles url encoding of spaces and the like without displaying the string literally like it used to.


I'd like to officially request that this Hijack feature be removed, as iTunes will now work properly with the same m3u as other programs. I'm sure it's probably nice to remove special case code like this, anyway.

I'll put out hijack v316 with this change incorporated later today.

-ml

Now that's service!