iTunes visualizers
Apple did a neat thing when they created iTunes and then put the visualizer into it. I mean, it wasn't an original idea, but I thought Apple did it well. At least then they did.
Now, Apple has almost entirely dropped interest in the visualizer end of iTunes. George Warner at Apple Tech Support has said as much. No more support. No more SDK updates. Another fun wrench in the works is that ever since iTunes 4.0, which brought the iTunes Music Store, iTunes won't run with a debugger attached. Screw you plug-in developers. Use printf instead!
Bah! So, here comes the first nugget of info I couldn't find on the internet that I had to go figure out for myself that I now give back to anyone else who happens to be trying to do the same thing. Wanna debug your iTunes visualizer plug-ins in a debugger on the Mac? Go find iTunes 3.0.1. Try here. I don't recommend running the installer to get the contents out. Open the installer package, find another iTunes3 installer package buried in the resources folder, open that one up, find an iTunes3.pax.gz or the like, unpack it, and pull the iTunes.app package out of the Applications folder that popped out of the pax archive. Put the app whereever you like. It will run just fine, even on 10.4.3. It won't be able to grok new iTunes library files, but it won't clobber them either, so you'll have to import some mp3's into the old iTunes library. At this point you can launch this iTunes with gdb or Xcode and debug away.
Update: a friend pointed me at this: How To Debug iTunes with Gdb
Another juicy iTunes visualizer bit is VizKit by Heiko Wichmann. This is an excellently written cross platform C++ iTunes visualizer toolkit based in OpenGL. Well thought out and nicely doxygened. One little caveat with it is that the iTunes visualizer SDK is based on the Windows version, which is newer than the Mac one on Apple's web site, and as such, it won't work with iTunes 3.0.1. I've made some changes to it to allow a compile time switch to be flipped to enable it to work in iTunes 3.0.1, but some of the unicode track information and album art features stop working. I figure this is fine as it still allows you to source level debug the rest of your visualizer code. I'll eventually integrate this back into the VizKit sources.
Now, Apple has almost entirely dropped interest in the visualizer end of iTunes. George Warner at Apple Tech Support has said as much. No more support. No more SDK updates. Another fun wrench in the works is that ever since iTunes 4.0, which brought the iTunes Music Store, iTunes won't run with a debugger attached. Screw you plug-in developers. Use printf instead!
Bah! So, here comes the first nugget of info I couldn't find on the internet that I had to go figure out for myself that I now give back to anyone else who happens to be trying to do the same thing. Wanna debug your iTunes visualizer plug-ins in a debugger on the Mac? Go find iTunes 3.0.1. Try here. I don't recommend running the installer to get the contents out. Open the installer package, find another iTunes3 installer package buried in the resources folder, open that one up, find an iTunes3.pax.gz or the like, unpack it, and pull the iTunes.app package out of the Applications folder that popped out of the pax archive. Put the app whereever you like. It will run just fine, even on 10.4.3. It won't be able to grok new iTunes library files, but it won't clobber them either, so you'll have to import some mp3's into the old iTunes library. At this point you can launch this iTunes with gdb or Xcode and debug away.
Update: a friend pointed me at this: How To Debug iTunes with Gdb
Another juicy iTunes visualizer bit is VizKit by Heiko Wichmann. This is an excellently written cross platform C++ iTunes visualizer toolkit based in OpenGL. Well thought out and nicely doxygened. One little caveat with it is that the iTunes visualizer SDK is based on the Windows version, which is newer than the Mac one on Apple's web site, and as such, it won't work with iTunes 3.0.1. I've made some changes to it to allow a compile time switch to be flipped to enable it to work in iTunes 3.0.1, but some of the unicode track information and album art features stop working. I figure this is fine as it still allows you to source level debug the rest of your visualizer code. I'll eventually integrate this back into the VizKit sources.
posted by Ace Cow at 12:06 AM
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