iTunes Remote

A Cal Henderson Project
Started May 13th, 2009

Screenshot

What Is It?

iTunesRemote is a simple web interface that allows you to control iTunes over the web. The setup looks something like this:

You have a Mac running iTunes (called the host machine), which contains all of your music and has speakers connected (or remote speakers via AirTunes)
You have other computers on the same network, which you want to use to control iTunes on the host machine.

I use this software to remote-control iTunes on my media server, which is connected to speakers around my house. It acts much like the Apple 'Remote' app for the iPhone, but runs in a browser (and is much less flakey). Multiple people can use it at once (and much hilarity ensues).

The application will only run on a Mac (It uses AppleScript to communicate with iTunes) and is written in PHP. OSX comes with Apache and PHP (required), but will require a little configuration.

Features

Play, Pause, Next, Previous
Volume control
Title, Artist & Album display
Time elapsed/remaining
Time scrub bar
Search
Artwork display
Partial track listing (works on large 25k+ libraries)
Progress indicators
Probably other things

Get a copy

iTunes Remote is being actively developed and has not had a formal release.

You can get the latest version of it from my public Git repository here:

https://github.com/iamcal/iTunesRemote

Credits

While all code has been (so far) written by Cal Henderson, the project was inspired by this article, which suggested AppleScript. If you want to remake this for Windows, there's a Python library for talking to iTunes via COM.