Global Hotkeys for iTunes

I always had a love/hate relationship with iTunes. I started using it a couple of years ago when I received an iPod Nano as a present for my birthday. I was immediately hooked by the library and podcast management features.

But iTunes can be very annoying sometimes. With each new version the application speed seems to decrease, startup times are bigger and program features seem to randomly disappear and reappear. For example the update from version 7 to 8 removed among others all the podcast management options and the ability to import songs as mp3 files. The latter magically appeared back in version 8.1. Also there is no way to control the player while other programs have focus using some system-wide key combination and there are no notifications when songs change.

In spite all this I still use it is my default music player because it’s the best way to manage my iPod and it’s one of the best podcast managers out there. And a few other cool features like iTunes U and Audible.com support.

Although the extensibility model for iTunes is not great, I found a plug-in that “displays a popup notifier window with track information (art cover, song name, artist, album)” each time a new track is played and a few applications that add global hotkeys support. I used for a while Jacob Hickman’s application but this is an external application, not an iTunes plug-in so every time you want to use it you have to remember to open it. What I really wanted was something similar with the iTunes toaster plug-in that added global hotkeys to the player.

And so iTunes Global Hotkeys Plug-in for Windows (ighp) was born. Ighp enables the user to trigger different actions using predefined shortcuts even if the player is minimized or hidden, just like the external apps do. The advantage is that it is automatically started and stopped with the player. You do not have to worry about anything else.

To achieve this, ighp uses a technique similar with the one used by the toaster plug-in. iTunes supports only visual plug-ins so ighp uses iTunes Visual Plug-ins SDK to make the player think it is a visual plug-in.

After the plug-in is loaded, it uses the iTunes COM for Windows SDK to control the player, just like the external applications do. The following actions are supported:

Action	Description
PlayPause	toggle play/pause
NextTrack	advance to the next track in playlist
PreviousTrack	go back to previous track in playlist
ToggleRandom	toggle random on/off
ToggleRepeat	toggle repeat on/off
SongRatingClear	clear rating for the selected song
SongRating1	set rating to one star
SongRating2	set rating to two stars
SongRating3	set rating to three stars
SongRating4	set rating to four stars
SongRating5	set rating to five stars
ShowHide	minimize/restore player window
VolumeUp	increase volume level
VolumeDown	decrease volume level
ToggleMute	toggle mute/unmute
OpenSettingsFile	Open settings file in notepad
ReloadHotkeys	Read the configuration file and reload the hotkey bindings

By default, only two actions are configured: OpenSettingsFile (Ctrl+Shift+P) and ReloadHotkeys (Ctrl+Shift+R). You can configure more actions using the instructions on the project’s page and then you can reload the configuration to activate the hotkeys. Here is an example of a typical settings file:

<hotkeys>
  <hotkey action="OpenSettingsFile" key="P" control="true" shift="true" />
  <hotkey action="ReloadHotkeys" key="R" control="true" shift="true" />
  <hotkey action="PlayPause" key="Spacebar" alt="true"/>
  <hotkey action="NextTrack" key="." alt="true"/>
  <hotkey action="PreviousTrack" key="," alt="true"/>
  <hotkey action="ShowHide" key="q" alt="true"/>
  <hotkey action="VolumeUp" key="a" alt="true"/>
  <hotkey action="VolumeDown" key="z" alt="true"/>
</hotkeys>

The latest release of the plugin can be found here. iTunes Global Hotkeys Plugin is released under the MIT/X Consortium License. Feel free to download the source code and if you fix a bug, or add a new feature, just send me a patch.

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