Global hotkeys in iTunes for Windows
iTunes is currently my favorite music player because it works flawlessly with the iPod (big surprise) and has an easy to use library with ratings. Of course the program has a few shortcomings, as does pretty much all software. One thing that has bugged me with the program is that you can’t fast forward through a song or rate tracks with the keyboard. You can pretty much control everything else in iTunes with the keyboard.
I hunted around on Google this past week trying to find a program that uses the iTunes COM module and enables you to use global hotkeys. I finally came across iTunes Remote. Don’t confuse this with the Mac version. It’s a totally different program. iTunes Remote for Windows lets you create a custom skinned iTunes miniplayer and global hotkeys. I’m not using the miniplayer feature currently because it uses more RAM and I don’t need it. The hotkeys work perfectly though. You can specify song rating commands as well as fast forwarding.
The program is still in beta and requires .NET framework 1.1. Give it a go if you want to rate your songs faster and have more control over iTunes though. It’s worked fine for me so far.
I found a new program called iTunesKeys that is more stable than iTunes Remote and it works perfectly with iTunes 7.
7 comments
(3 years, 4 months ago)
Hey man - thanks for the link!
(3 years, 3 months ago)
on my computer it has a prob with high cpu usage 2.2 GHz Celeron w/ 512 ram, xp home
(3 years, 3 months ago)
Yeah that happens to me too. The program is a resource hog.
(2 years, 3 months ago)
[...] Global hotkeys in iTunes for Windows iTunes is currently my favorite music player because it works flawlessly with the iPod (big surprise) and has an easy to use library with ratings. Of course the program has a few shortcomings, as does pretty much all software. One thing that has bugged me with the program is that you can’t fast forward through a song or rate tracks with the keyboard. You can pretty much control everything else in iTunes with the keyboard. [...]
(1 year, 8 months ago)
iTunesKeys works pretty well and is quite nice for those who are sticking with their zboard like me
(1 year, 7 months ago)
fyi i find this is MUCH better. http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/topic5727.html.
Ituneskeys is a resource hog in comparison is a bit unstable.
(1 year, 6 months ago)
iTunesKeys seems to work great! The global hotkeys were the only reason I kept using winamp. I’m now using an old version of iTunes (without all the online ****) and iTunesKeys.