Atlantis in bits

iTunes and iPod can remember the playing positions for M4B files, so it’s good for audio books and lectures. You can convert MP4 files to M4B files with software such as MP3 to M4B Converter. But the converter crashed in my computer.

I remember there’s a audioconvertor plug-in in my Total Commander, and guessed probably it could do this job for me. Fortunately, it does!

Select MP3 files, press ALT+F5, choose audioconvertor, tune some settings, and press OK!

I have a playlist with probably 10 songs in it. But these songs are in my external USB hard disk, instead of my laptop’s hard disk. I plugged in my USB hard disk, and enjoyed this playlist repeatedly. After a while, the USB hard disk was incautiously plugged out and iTunes skipped each song one by one and got into a deadly infinite loop. At that time, my computer had no response at all, and I turned the power off directly.

Fortunately, I was doing nothing on my laptop at that time, and haven’t lost anything. Anyway, I believe iTunes should consider this exception and avoid this infinite loop. And actually, leveraging some flag variables  could fix this.

iTunes is really a good player for organizing medias ( I don’t mean it’s good at playing them), especially with iPod. But it lacks many common features which exist in other players, and doesn’t provide any plug-in or scripts mechanism to enhance it by ourselves. Following 3 features are what I want to have with my iTunes：

• After downloading subscribed podcast, sync iPod if connected.
• Backup (support, but partially) or move podcast files to another place periodically.
• Execute a action (such as pause, sync, or update podcast) at a specified time.

At present, I am quite busy. Probably I have to write a tool to do such things by myself.

I like listening to music before falling into sleep, but as I know, iTunes doesn’t provide such feature to pause iTunes after a specified interval. I wrote a small C++ program to do it. Binaries and source codes are attached below.

Actually, it should be much easier to code such program with VB, C# or even JScript and python. But I haven’t written C++ program for a long time, I’d like to pick up this skill.

some materials:
iTunes COM for Windows

Binary: iTimer.exe

Source Code: TimerTune.7z