Corridor 9

While I’m not a card carrying, pocket protector member of the geek culture, I still consider myself a geek to some extent. I’m a linux phreak, tech junkie, email addict, and all around computer nerd.

I ran across this guys page while looking up solutions for a problem I’m having with iTunes. I especially like his title “Tech / Faith / Life”. It’s real cool to find other Christians out there who share the same interests as me. God knows Kristie doesn’t understand my desire to recompile kernel drivers to properly integrate my Treo into Evolution.

Well… after all the hassle we had before; http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=881133

It appears that iTunes developers have addressed part of the problem with the multimedia keys in 7.1.1. Now the play/pause, stop, forward, and reverse buttons work well, even when iTunes is minimized to the systray.

However, the volume buttons are still hosed. Whenever iTunes isn’t the “top window”, or window in focus and I press mute it still mutes the system, then quickly unmutes it again. The same for pressing the up and down volume. When iTunes is in focus it will only increase the volume by 1 notch. When iTunes isn’t in focus it increases or decreases the volume by two notches.

What would really be nice is if there were a checkbox in the preferences section to completely disable iTunes multimedia key support.

Still a bad day for me, so I’m going back to 7.02 again.

UPDATE: I’ve solved this issue. Check this link to get more information: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=899624&tstart=0

While I do not officially support any candidate, I thought this was quite a good commercial. Those of you out there who may remember the 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh Commercial will definitely get a kick out of this one.

Where iTunes Went Wrong | MattFarina.com

Gee… no wonder iTunes stoped working with Christianrock.net. This is kindof like buying a car from Ford that only runs on Ford gas.

I’ve been using iTunes for the past few years with great success. I know there are some of you who absolutely hate Apple and all they stand for. Quite honestly, I don’t like their closed source way of thinking either, but I must admit they have products that work….. most of the time.

In the past I had to use a hack to get my multimedia keys to work with iTunes. After installing this small script in the plug-ins folder, I was able to control playback with the keys on the side of my laptop. Even when iTunes was minimized in my systray, the keys still worked.

Lately iTunes has been crapping out though. Apple rewrote part of iTunes code to allow it to natively use the multimedia keys without having to hack it with an additional plugin. However, now the problem is a “doubling up” in the commands. I’m not sure why, but apparently both iTunes and Windoze seem to be fighting for control. Now when I press mute, iTunes mutes the computer, then Windoze unmutes it. Its the same with the play/pause button and the volume buttons. This is quite annoying, but Apple has yet to step forward and even acknowledge the problem.

You can find out more information here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=881133