This post is a bit different to my others since I’m not really writing about the happenings and what-not, it’s more of a public notepad for me to come up with ideas for my application; iTunesTweet.
The ideas that I write about may or may not become a part of the stable release of iTunesTweet. This could be due to various reasons:
- It’s not stable, i.e. it doesn’t work in the way that it was intended to or it has too many bugs for me to take care of at one time.
- There is no need for the feature. Some times I may come up with an idea that I think would be useful, however in real world testing, the majority of users would think otherwise.
- It changes a big part of the code. I don’t have time to re-write the main system again, so features will be currently limited to the size and time they’ll take to integrate.
So now that I’ve covered my ass from people who may get annoyed that a feature they really like isn’t in the application, I can begin writing ideas!
Now playing feed
This would be a global feature available on the website (once the re-design is finished). With a few modifications to the log sequence it would be possible for me to see how many songs are currently playing (ignoring the fact the user may press pause) and display them in a feed on the website.
This shouldn’t be too hard to integrate since I’d only have to work out when the song will stop playing (TTL for the song).
Random maths jibber
Current time – (song length + length played for) : something like that anyway
I think this feature would open up many new possibilities for the application. A feed of currently playing songs across the world would be a brilliant way to promote music. The more people playing the song, the more it stands out.
We could even take into consideration the rating the song has, and use this to promote it further.
Share playlist
I promise this has nothing to do with the recent movements by Spotify which now allow you to share playlists to friends at Twitter and Facebook!
Technically it should be possible for me to find out the playlist in which the currently playing song resides in. Through this it would then be possible for the user to share that playlist on their Twitter account. The website would also be able to group playlists by Twitter user (which could cause problems if the user changed their username, but it’s a risk).
It’s not a big idea nor particularly complicated but it’s a nice way to share music with the world.
Better error handling
This is a given, something that I should have implemented a while ago. Due to Twitters recent surge in problems, iTunesTweet needs to be equipped with enough decisions in its code to handle as many problems as I find.
Thanks to Cohen I was able to fix one problem this morning. And since Twitter fails so much at the moment, now is a brilliant time for me to teach iTunesTweet to handle all kinds of errors.
Eventually the error log file will consist of a deeper analysis of the problems including:
- Epoch/unix time stamps
- All data that iTunesTweet was sending
- Twitter status code
- And whatever else I deem useful to further investigation
The resulting file will automatically be sent to the server when it reaches a preset amount of errors, or you can choose to send it if the error level is bugging you.
Song correction tool
We all have songs in our libraries which have imported names such as “03 David Guetta – Memories” or with spelling mistakes “Dvd Guetta – Memorys” – maybe it’s just me, but I find them annoying and I hate correcting them as I find them.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if iTunesTweet could analyze every song in your library and automatically correct or suggest the real spellings?
I’ve applied for an API key at Song.ly in the hope to integrate this feature into the code! To reduce the amount of API calls iTunesTweet makes, it would be a good idea for my server to cache all of the original and correct strings and then run the files against the server. Once I have a base library of a few thousand songs, I could further the development of the tool to check my server before song.ly – see I play nice with API developers.
Album art for those which iTunes Store can’t find
Some times iTunes Store can’t find album art to a song because it’s based on both the artist and the song title or because iTunes just fails at these kinds of things.
It should be possible for me to write a custom album artwork handler for all of the songs that iTunes can’t handle.
Keep in mind that this feature would still be limited to how accurate the song information is, although a mix of this and the song correction tool should give you good results most of the time!
More to come
Some more ideas will probably arise because of these, or betas will come out with me testing them, so keep an eye out 
For the past couple of days I’ve been developing a new feature for iTunesTweet – a duplicate song manager which is able to delete all duplicate songs in your library.
Currently it’s a very crude method, but it works extremely well and will continue to stay like this till such developments have been tried and tested on various users. I’m hoping to have this new feature tested by a few people and get some suggestions on the process and alike.
Here are a couple of screenshots of iTunesTweet cleaning my library.
Be kind to the screen behind, it’s code. And before you ask, it’s project “iScan”
It’s surprising how much memory a few files can save.
To download the beta version and try out the new feature, click here.
In the future, I’ll be using a temporary SQL database instead of a crude and limited scripted array.
At the end of January I released a program I’d been working on for a while, iTunesTweet. If you can’t guess what it does from the name, then take a step back and just think about it 
The application simply tweets what you’re currently listening to on iTunes, to Twitter.
3 months later and iTunesTweet has been downloaded over 100 times and over 6000 songs have been logged – iTunesTweet optionally allows you to send data to my site, otherwise I know nothing! I’m personally very proud on the statistics iTT has stacked up! It’s quite resounding to know how much music is played, and I can’t thank everyone who has opted in to the data collection scheme enough!
Some of the statistics were erased when I changed the way storage works, unfortunately I was unable to convert previously stored data because of the routines the data goes through. I also provide a little page which you can see how many songs are played per day and the previous days too! Check out iTunesTweet Usage Graph.
Recently I’ve been working on a number of fixes that have caused the application to respond incorrectly to certain iTunes events – specifically when iTunes tries to close. And of course, new features!
I hope the new features I’ve been implementing make it easier to use and make iTT a better application over all. So what exactly are these features and how will they improve iTT? Currently to change any settings, unless you know how to use Regedit, require you to practically re-install iTunesTweet which is not good – I know – so I’ve been working on a nice “Options” window which lets you change settings quickly and easily! The options GUI is a completely custom drawn window using some awesome GDI. By adding this new window, I’m able to add new functions and their available options with no problems!
As of now, iTunesTweet notifies you of the song your playing through a tray tip, which is kind of boring.
Boring!
Now however, I’ve added a toast! Similar to Windows Live Messenger, iTunesTweet now notifies you in the same manner only using a custom toast popup. I still have some work left to do it, the boring grey probably wont stay for too long.
I’ve also changed the way it contacts my website for usage details. It now requires the iTunesTweet user-agent which is a stop against spam agents messing statistics (not that they have, but I’m prepared).
A new update function automatically updates iTunesTweet when there is an available download. This is a feature I love in every application and makes using the program problemless!
In the future, I intend to add scrobble support – only if Last.FM isn’t doing so already. This means that not only will Twitter know what you’re listening to, but Last.FM too! Two networks in one!
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