iTunes 11
I’ve been testing iTunes 11 since its release today and am happy to report that Signal remains compatible with the new version, with one gotcha. There is currently a bug in the Mac version of iTunes that prevents Signal from being able to read or set the shuffle or repeat states. Hopefully Apple will release a fix soon, in the meantime I’ll be looking into a workaround. The Windows version of iTunes has a minor version of the same bug - Signal can read and set the shuffle and repeat states, but the shuffle/repeat icons in the iTunes UI do not update with any changes made through Signal.
The big change for remote control apps in the new iTunes is probably Up Next, a queuing function that looks to be a lot more useful than the Party Shuffle of old. Apple hasn’t provided any official API for this feature but Signal may be able to take advantage of it through the DMCP support introduced in Signal 1.6. I’ll be investigating that for a future release.
Update: After further testing I’ve run into some additional issues when using Signal with the new iTunes:
- When playing a group of items only the first song from the group is played, iTunes then returns to whatever it was playing before
- Selecting a song to jump to in a playlist does not actually move the playlist position but plays only that song
- Sometimes edits to the Signal queue are not picked up if the queue is currently being played
- The playlist view is not accurate if anything is manually queued through Up Next
- iTunes displays a modal dialog when trying to play a song or group if anything is manually queued through Up Next
I’m looking into the best way to solve these issues for the next update.
Update 2: All iTunes 11 compatiblity issues have been resolved in Signal 1.7.