Archive for September, 2011

iTunes Media Key Fix

September 29th, 2011

The version on this page is outdated. Updated for iTunes 10.5+ here.

Here’s the deal: iTunes refuses to support global media hotkeys. When you’re writing your research paper and you want to pause the song for a bathroom break, you can’t use that convenient play/pause button on your media keyboard or stereo bluetooth headset (I love that button on my Moto S9-HD). You have to open the iTunes window and move your mouse all the way to the on-screen button. Not being sarcastic; I have 3 monitors.

There used to be a cool dll that you could drop into the iTunes plugins folder and remedy everything. No more — iTunes 10.4 broke the plugin, as I was first to note in the comments.

iTunes 10.4.1 came out and claimed to fix “a problem where the media keys on some third-party keyboards work inconsistently with iTunes.” Riiight.

We can discuss the politics of Apple hating on PC users as much as we want, but some of us need our working play/pause buttons.

Drop into your Startup folder (in the Start Menu) and restart/relogin. It’s a compiled AutoIt3 script, which some antivirus programs don’t like. Deal with it.

Download (Windows EXE file) – this version for iTunes 10.4 is outdated!

Size: 294KB

 

 

Drop and forget. Simple and painless. It only works with the play/pause button [and now prev/next]. Because that’s the only button I ever use. Like, who ever uses the stop button?

Why I am posting this when I really should be writing my college application essays, I’m not quite sure.

Moral of the story: don’t “update” things that are working fine.

Bugfix 1. (9-29-2011) If another window title starts with iTunes (such as a browser on this web page) the play/pause key may not function. Fixed. Tested and uploaded. What am I doing with my life at 2am…

Bugfix 2. (9-30-2011) If the iTunes search box (on the top right) is focused the play/pause key may not function.

Update. (10-06-2011) Previous and next buttons added. Remove the old hk.exe before dragging this one into the startup folder.

Please Excuse This Interruption

September 19th, 2011

The Leafwood Project will be taking a short break as its authors pause to ponder college applications.

Not that our recent posting has been very prolific anyway.

WD Caviar Greens are amazing

September 6th, 2011

Just wanted to pop in to say… WD Caviar Green hard disks have amazing R/W speed and mind-blowing storage capacity. I got my hands on one, brand new, for only around $60-70 with shipping.128MB/s read and write speeds are to die for across 2 terabytes of capacity. (I realize I only tested the first 256MB of the partition, which is the outer edge of the disk that moves the fastest (because velocity equals radius times omega), lol.)

For comparison, my Seagate Barracuda that shipped with this Dell PC gets ~80MB/s (but then again Windows is running off this partition and it’s 90% full because of my anime), and an old WD Caviar Blue (really old — 80GB drive) that used to be in the server that hosted leafwood (Dell rack-mountable server server — that hard drive’s gotta be the real deal) only got ~60MB/s (but then again I’m swapping off this partition, not that Windows likes me managing its swap file, and swap is gonna take up a lot of I/O because Windows likes playing with its swap when it’s bored).

I’m installing Win7 on this new HDD when I get some free time (hopefully… sometime soon… not expecting anything). Vista’s working fine though, I guess, so no hurry. Gah, so indecisive.

Oh yeah, that last comment was the 600th comment.

Re-reading this post, those parentheticals are a pain to read.