unlock.

Recently, everybody was speaking about iTunes and how cool it was. I decided to give it a go. Because I don’t own any Apple hardware and thus no MacOS, I had to chose the Windows version which seemed to work well too. Playing around with it showed it was fine, with a few drawbacks:

• Playing back Ogg Vorbis files crashed iTunes
• You need some weird Apple iTunes Music Store account to easily load cover art
• No hot folders - my old MP3 collection, sorted by folders and filenames is not really compatible with the ID3-tag based iTunes structure. Some work ahead ;-)
• I have no iPod

I was easily able to solve the first drawback: A new Quicktime component needs to be added to the QTComponents directory of the Quicktime installation. The component can be downloaded from http://xiph.org/quicktime/. But what’s that? Replaying .ogg-files still crashes iTunes. Something like one hour later, I discovered that there was another Ogg Vorbis Quicktime component in the /Windows/System32/Quicktime directory - deleting it made iTunes easily play Ogg files.

I still do not have any clever solutions for the other drawbacks - the hot folder thing can be tricked by just adding the same folder to Quicktime again and again - it is clever enough to not add tracks twice.

Oh, and I finally created an account at last.fm - nice thing, but err… what do I use it for?