{"id":335,"date":"2006-08-08T19:59:35","date_gmt":"2006-08-08T19:59:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.robertprice.co.uk\/robblog\/2006\/08\/itunes_now_playing_in_c_-shtml\/"},"modified":"2006-08-08T19:59:35","modified_gmt":"2006-08-08T19:59:35","slug":"itunes_now_playing_in_c_-shtml","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertprice.co.uk\/robblog\/itunes_now_playing_in_c_-shtml\/","title":{"rendered":"iTunes Now Playing In C#"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nI’ve been playing about with the COM interface to Apple’s iTunes<\/a> running on a windows machine with .NET installed.\n<\/p>\n

\nMy choice of language has been C# as it’s a bit more Perl<\/a> like than VB. I’ve used Microsoft’s “free” Visual C# Express in this case.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe iTunes SDK<\/acronym><\/a> is available from Apple and has all the documentation needed.\n<\/p>\n

\nI’m going to run through how to get Now Playing information out of iTunes. The quickest way to do this is as a console application.\n<\/p>\n

\nStart up Visual C# and create a new console application. I called mine NowPlaying<\/code>.\n<\/p>\n

\nYou’ll need to add a reference to the iTunes come library. Do this on the righthand side of the C# project window by right clicking and selecting “Add Reference…”, selecting the COM tab, and finding the iTunes library.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe first thing you’ll need to in your code is to import the iTunes namespace to make the code look a little cleaner. We’ll also need the System interface for our console input and output.\n<\/p>\n

using System;
\nusing iTunesLib;
\n<\/code><\/div>\n

\nIn your Main method, the first thing we need to do is to create an instance of the iTunesAppClass<\/code>. I’ve rather originally called mine, app<\/var>.\n<\/p>\n

\/\/ Create a new iTunesApp object to use
\niTunesApp app = new iTunesAppClass();
\n<\/code><\/div>\n

\nNext we need to get the current track. This is a simple attribute call to the app<\/var> object.\n<\/p>\n

\/\/ Get the current track from iTunes.
\nITTrack track = app.CurrentTrack;
\n<\/code><\/div>\n

\nFinally we need to show the current track. To do this we call two attributes on our track<\/var> variable, name<\/var> and artist<\/var>. There are plenty of other attributes we could call, but these are the two most useful for this example. See the SDK for more choice.\n<\/p>\n

\nOnce we have displayed our name and artist, we need to wait for the user to hit return. This is useful if our program wasn’t launched from a console window as it would end before we’ve had a chance to read any output.\n<\/p>\n

\/\/ Display some info on the current track.
\nConsole.WriteLine(\"Current Track: {0}rnCurrent Artist: {1}\" , track.Name, track.Artist);
\n\/\/ Pause until we hit return.
\nConsole.ReadLine();
\n<\/code><\/div>\n

\nThat’s it, nice and easy.\n<\/p>\n

\nHere’s the full .cs source code.\n<\/p>\n

using System;
\nusing iTunesLib;
\nnamespace NowPlaying
\n{
\nclass Program
\n{
\nstatic void Main(string[] args)
\n{
\n\/\/ Create a new iTunesApp object to use
\niTunesApp app = new iTunesAppClass();
\n\/\/ Get the current track from iTunes and return its artist and name.
\nIITTrack track = app.CurrentTrack;
\nConsole.WriteLine(\"Current Track: {0}rnCurrent Artist: {1}\" , track.Name, track.Artist);
\n\/\/ Pause until we hit return.
\nConsole.ReadLine();
\n}
\n}
\n}
\n<\/code><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been playing about with the COM interface to Apple’s iTunes running on a windows machine with .NET installed. My choice of language has been C# as it’s a bit more Perl like than VB. I’ve used Microsoft’s “free” Visual C# Express in this case. The iTunes SDK is available from Apple and has all … Continue reading “iTunes Now Playing In C#”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7,17],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dev","tag-net","tag-dev"],"yoast_head":"\niTunes Now Playing In C# - Robert Price<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.robertprice.co.uk\/robblog\/itunes_now_playing_in_c_-shtml\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"iTunes Now Playing In C# - Robert Price\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve been playing about with the COM interface to Apple’s iTunes running on a windows machine with .NET installed. 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