Tag: iTunes

OS X Tip: Prevent iTunes from Opening when Pressing Play/Pause Key

People that own a Mac and use Spotify must have noticed the same annoying behavior of iTunes as I did. When you press the Play/Pause key on your keyboard, not only will Spotify start/stop playback of your music, but iTunes will open and start playing music as well. I don’t know if Apple sees this as an intended feature of iTunes but what I do know is that it’s incredibly annoying to say the least.

After looking around for a while on the Internet for a solution I found a workaround that is very elegant and does not need any additional programs to be installed or any scripts to be run.

Continue reading OS X Tip: Prevent iTunes from Opening when Pressing Play/Pause Key

iTunes Tip: Keyboard Shortcut for the Search Field

As long as I have been using iTunes on the Mac I have been looking for a keyboard shortcut that puts the cursor in the search field in the upper right corner of the iTunes window. There is absolutely no mention of this shortcut key in the help files or in the menus. Even the official keyboard shortcuts overview for iTunes on Apple’s website does not list it.

After googling for a solution numerous times, trying out lots of key combinations and asking questions on Twitter a couple of times I finally found the answer on a forum:

Command + Option + F

Terrific!

Update January 8th, 2011:
In the Windows version of iTunes, use

CTRL + ALT + F

(Kudos to Stefaan for mentioning this in the comments)

Shuffled Conspiracy Part 2

So I am not the only one who came up with this subject! I found an article by David Braue on the Australian version of  CNET.com in which he describes an experiment he did with iTunes. You can find the article here:

iTunes: Just how random is random?

The first four conclusions from his experiment were:

  • 20 playlists (10 of 25 songs, and 10 of 40 songs) were created from a pool of 100 iTunes Music Store sourced songs, and 20 additional playlists when the pool was expanded to 200 songs using CD-ripped songs. This provided a total of 1300 slots to be filled at random.
  • On average, one would expect each song to appear on 6.5 playlists.
  • Popular, top-50 singles were rotated onto our playlists far more frequently than would be expected. Some artists, having just one song in the iTunes Library, were played more often than the entire 5-song collections of other artists.
  • Artists and singles purchased through iTunes were played more frequently than those that were not.

So how about that one?

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)