“groovy mother...”

Lightweight menu-bar app for OSX which displays, and lets you edit, the star rating for the current track in iTunes.

Got this as part of MacHeist recently, and dismissed it as “pointless eyecandy”. I couldn’t be more wrong — While it is graphically-lovely, it allows for keyboard control of iTunes (including tasks like rating tracks) and is a lower-memory last.fm client than the official last.fm client. Added to my Login Items!

Sums up how I feel about the whole fucking stupid “email addresses stored in iTunesPlus files” storm in a teacup. I’m ashamed to be an EFF supporter sometimes.

Tag your tunes by mood, then shuffle away for the right mix. Would be interesting to see if there’s a consistent way to share moods across users…

Apple will be selling DRM-free music from EMI next month. Pitched as “higher-quality” (256kbps AAC) to justify the price increase. The interesting statistic once this launches is going to be the number of people who choose the lower-cost DRMed version.

Replace the iTunes icon in the dock with the coverart of the currently playing track. Nice.

Steve Jobs publicly calls for the record companies to drop their requirement for DRM on online music sales: “Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. […] This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Interesting thought: Is your “music collection” just your audio files, or is it all the ratings and playlists and stuff that go along with it? Is Apple’s DRM less of a lock-in than just the time spent organising your music *just so* in iTunes?

This weekend, the UK charts will switch to including sales of all digital tracks, not just those marked as “singles”. As a result, album tracks and one-hit wonders are likely to hit the Top 100. Anything that gets The Proclaimers into the charts *has* to be a good thing.

Tsk. I should have known better than to link to an Orlowski post on The Reg.

App that works with iTunes to build up “smart” playlists from your library. Seems to be entirely metadata based (no fingerprinting), and limited to your existing library. Giving it a spin now.

Some kind of weird audioscrobbler-type thing, that allows you to deal with Tags inside iTunes. Or something. Their site is incomprehensibly flashy and slidey and swoopy and I only got five hours sleep last night.

Dan takes on the new iTunes UI.

Well, it’s the law. Apple either have to open up their DRM to other devices and music stores, or shutdown the iTunes Music Store in France. I’ll put $50 on the latter. (Update: OK, it’s not the law yet: It has to pass France’s Senate yet. Stupid multi-house parliamentary systems)

‘DRM-protected files exclusively released through iTunes … appear in unprotected form on P2P networks 180 seconds later’. Well, that makes screwing your honest customers worthwhile.

This brilliant little applet analyses your iTunes library and based on your listening behaviour, patches together a short “signature” of your music taste. I’ll upload mine in a moment.