faster.better.smarter

I’ve recently reinstalled a great little app to help me control iTunes, without actually switching to iTunes and thereby distracting me for the next 30 minutes. It’s called Bytecontroller.

Bytecontroller lives in your menu bar and has a very simple, three button interface. You have back, play/pause, and next, which is fine for simple tasks. But there are other features under the hood.

The General preferences are just about as general as you can get. You have a launch at startup option and a space-saving show only when iTunes is open.

The Hot Keys panel allows you to setup hotkeys that allow you control iTunes without moving your hands from the keyboard, including increasing the volume.

The appearance panel allows you to change what the controls look like in the menu bar. It also seems to allow you to add your own “themes” but it’s unclear where you would get these from. It’s a great little app and you can get for free here.

Play Hourly Newscasts is a great AppleScript that detects when there is a new version of four different podcasts from news networks and plays it in between your normal music listening. Obviously, this is Mac only as Windows doesn’t support AppleScript. Very good way of listening to music and keeping with the news at the same time.

Download it and others at Doug’s AppleScripts.

I have to admit that I was incredibly skeptical when I first heard that Amazon was launching a mp3 download store. I think that the main reason that the iTunes Music Store has been so incredibly successful is that is so easy to use. You shop for a song, click to download, and within in a few minutes its in your library ready to be synchronized to your iPod. Easy, easy. The reason I haven’t bought any music from iTunes in a few years is that I hate DRM.

I used eMusic for awhile, and while I loved the the lack of DRM, the download process was not as automatic and I frequently would forget to pick my 40 songs during the month, losing what songs I didn’t download.

Amazonmp3 seems to be a nice midway point between ease of use and DRM freedom (not to mention great pricing).

I sat down this evening to test it out and fully expected to browse through the website looking for a song that I wanted, then go through a long purchase process, then get the standard “save to disk” dialogue, and then have to drag the song into my iTunes, and then look for artwork and maybe rename the file.

I was very surprised with what I discovered. I admit that it wasn’t as easy as iTunes. I did have to update my billing information because I haven’t purchased anything from Amazon in a long time. But it was pretty easy to setup. I downloaded the Amazonmp3 downloader and installed it. It looked like your basic download program.

Then I took a peak at the preferences for this little app. Not too much there, but the most exciting part was the option to add the tracks directly to iTunes. I didn’t expect that it would really work.

After the installation I went back to the site to discover that I was being offered an opportunity to download a track by the Apples in Stereo to test out the new site. So i clicked on the link and a file popped for download and asked me where to save it. Ridiculous! But then I realized that it was Firefox asking what to do with a new file type. I told it that it should always open this file type with the new Downloader program and clicked ok, and it immediately loaded the song into the downloader. In a few minutes the song was downloaded.

So there was my new file. And when went to iTunes, it was already there with high quality artwork.

I don’t think this new service is going to take down iTunes anytime soon. But with albums priced between 5.99 and 8.99 and single tracks at .89, this is where I’ll be looking first for new music.

Now if only that unbox thing could work as nicely.

I just discovered a great side by side comparison at TUAW