How-to use Itunes as Music Interface ? (1 Viewer)

[petzlux]

Hi

This post is about an idea which I had recently, but didnt get very far with it. It might be a bit offtopic as well as it treats also some problems i have with itunes.

:sorry:

I really like the Album Artflow interface of itunes as a way to listen to my music and browse my collection, and wanted to use this from MediaPortal.
To be honest, I am more confused than anything else so far with the Music Interface of Mediaportal.
So I thought, I could start Itunes from within Mediaportal using some of the program launching plugins. This was the easy bit and i got a link in the main menu going using multishortcutplugin to launch itunes and minimise MP.

Inside Itunes then though, the remote I use (MCE Remote) works only in a very limited way. Do any of you guys know of a way to map commands on mce remote to use in other programs than MP, eg Itunes?
Also, there is no way to return to MP when I am finished with listening to music, as I cant exit Itunes using the remote.

Okay, so lessons from that? It would be great if we could find an effective way to use Itunes as the main Music Interface, or failing that, how would people feel if the way music is organised and navigated inside MP could be similar to Itunes ? Or is this already the case, I thought not so as the interface is more complicated to my eyes.

 

[jensnasholm]

Hi there,

There is a software called HIP (http://byremote.com.au/HIP) where you can configure keyboard commands and link them to remote control "commands". This way you should be able to fully control iTunes from the remote using the available keyboard commands within iTunes. The good thing is that you can also tell HIP to react differently in in different applicaitons, or not at all for some, such as MP. It needs a bit of tinkering to get going...but i had this going with mulitple applications at the same time using a third party remote no-one knew about.

>> Just saw on their website that they also have a specific MCE module...that will most likely be useful for you <<

Good luck,
Jens

 

[petzlux]

Wow great got it to work now, but had difficulties with HID in the beginning. The one thing that finally made it work was that in the MCE replacement plugin you need to check "enable message mode" for hid to be able to pass IR Commands to MP. That took me two hours to find out, hope no one else here struggles so much with that.

Anyone else wanting to do this, will need to use the mce replacement driver and mce replacement plugin, afaik it doesnt work with the normal driver.

Other than that, looks like this is exactly what I wanted, have setup my commands in HID for Itunes and can now switch between Itunes and MP no problem ! Great solution.