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iTunes Track can even place track information along the menu bar.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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iTunes Track shows (or speaks) the current music track in iTunes


June 23, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   Ever since I switched from Windows to an Apple computer, I've done most of my music listening through iTunes. But iTunes had an annoying problem. Rather than wait for Apple to solve it, I've found the fix myself.
   I'll share my iTunes fix-me-up this week. It's free, easy to implement and exceptionally useful.
   Don't get me wrong. I consider iTunes the best program I've ever used, for any computer. It's brilliant. But when I'm listing to music on my G4 Macintosh, I'm always doing something else, too. I think of it as a poor man's form of multitasking.
   By "doing something else," I usually mean that I am reading and replying to e-mail, writing articles, traveling around the Web and editing digital images.
   In a mix like that, my desktop is full of stuff I need to see. So my iTunes software is hidden away -- literally. I hide it by pressing Cmd-H as soon as I choose the playlist.
   But my playlists are anything but simple. Many of them are three or four hours long. I've got one that runs through all the Shostakovich string quartets and another that plays dozens of gospel songs by the Gaithers. Like a lot of other iTunes fans, I have far too many playlists to memorize.
   But when iTunes is playing, you'd have to keep the program's playlists on screen to know what you're listening to much of the time. Is that the second movement of Shostakovich's eighth quartet or the third? Are the Gaithers singing the third song from their "A Cappella" album or the second tune from another one? How could I possibly know these things?
   Ah, but it's easy, as I found out when I installed iTunes Track, an iTunes helper program from Jumpingfish, a German software site. You can download it from www.jumpingfish.de. iTunes Track is free to use, but you can send a small donation if you want.
   iTunes Track places a single line of text on your screen that lists the name and other information about the currently playing music on iTunes. That probably doesn't sound like a great idea -- after all, if your desktop is already cluttered, where are you going to fit something else? But iTunes Track has a treat in store.
   You can put the track information line literally OFF the desktop, up in the menu bar. You simply drag it up there and it never gets in the way. I don't know if this sort of placement is an Officially Approved Spot, but I don' care if Apple minds or not. To me, iTunes Track is a perfect example of how to do something right.
   Or, well, make that almost right. It has one itsy little flaw. I'll tell you about that in a minute.
   iTunes Track can show the current track information in any of eight different ways. For classical music, I like to see the composer listed first, but I often play with the other settings when I'm listening to Jerry Garcia or Rita Springer.
   Even more impressive is the way iTunes Track can speak the name of the track that's about to play. Be careful if others share your computer, because the ghostly voice can be unnerving at first. (You can turn off that feature, as I did.)
   Now, ahem, about that flaw. Because sticking text messages in the menu bar is not Apple's idea of a good thing, iTunes Track has to beg the Mac for permission to go there every time you run the software. So it never remembers its previous position and always starts up in the middle of your desktop. You'll have to click on it and slide it up to the menu bar each time.