iTunes Plugin Bad News

So while I know this plugin will never be updated, it seems to have reached the end of its life, at least for me. The plugin does not work with my M1 iMac running Big Sur, or my M1 MBP running Monterey, the common thread being the M1 chip. No reason to think a future update will change this.

As it is, I'm using some scripting now for some music related tasks, and have also leveraged data from AirFoil to help when the iTunes plugin won't work.

Guess all good things have to come to an end, but having Indigo control the music in the house has been a big part of what I use Indigo for. Sorry to see this happen, but not surprised.

This is really unfortunate..

Guess I'll hold onto my old 2012Mac mini I7 running 10.14 as long as I can, was considering moving up to a new Mac mini M1.

Agreed

Not quite enough for me to go back to Intel, as sooner or later, we'll all have to move on. I know nothing about programming, but do find it just a bit odd that the iTunes Local Control plugin still works... which is, I guess, just a bunch of AppleScripts, and not as "entangled" with the actual code of the Music app as the iTunes Plugin is.

It was fun while it lasted.....

[jay (support)]

I know nothing about programming, but do find it just a bit odd that the iTunes Local Control plugin still works... which is, I guess, just a bunch of AppleScripts, and not as "entangled" with the actual code of the Music app as the iTunes Plugin is.

The iTunes plugin uses a reverse-engineered library that mimics the DACP protocol (which was never actually made public to developers) over network connections (even if its on the same Mac) - iTunes/Music used it for many years and was used by the Remote app on iOS as well. But, nobody has done any work on that library in just as many years and it finally broke. Apple never officially supported any method for 3rd parties to control iTunes aside from AppleScript. We've since learned not to ship any product that depends on reverse-engineered technology for just this reason, and iTunes was the holdover. I had actually meant to remove iTunes from the 2021.2 installer, but just dropped the ball on that one. It will not be included in the next feature release.

The iTunes Local Control plugin just executes AppleScripts to do it's work, so it's a completely different/unrelated approach.

NOTE: the plugin should continue to work with iTunes/Music on Catalina and earlier - they broke backwards compatibility in Big Sur.

Hey Jay

not that it matters, but there is an iTunes DACP plugin for Homebridge, and it doesn't work on M1 Macs either....or at least I can't get it to work...lol

I know I've discussed this in the past over the years, so the whole "reverse engineering" part is not new for me. I'm just glad it's worked as long as it has. There have been new OS releases, where the plugin didn't work on the first releases, but ended up working as both the OS and the Music App went thru updates.... But obviously M1 is the cliff.

I'm glad that Airfoil and the local iTunes plug both still work as I've leaned more heavily on them as of late, and can probably do some very basic scripting to replace the plugin and get done what I need anyway.

and can probably do some very basic scripting to replace the plugin and get done what I need anyway.

Any luck with that basic scripting? The iTunes plugin gets deauthorized for me after as little as 10 minutes sometimes, and all I really need is a way to let Indigo know that a new track is playing.

I'm not the best at scripting, but the Airfoil plugin works well with Indigo, so I use it to watch for changes in Song Title, and trigger from there. Don't remember how much AirFoil costs to buy, but I'm sure you can download a demo version and at least try it out. Very easy to set up for use with Indigo.

Just thought I'd put out an observation of some strange behavior with this plugin that might help others still using it:

Catalina iTunes (so really Apple Music) running on a separate box from Indigo, as my Indigo machine is older and not able to run Catalina. I had begun noticing some flakiness with iTunes on 10.13, so moved it.

Every now and then, the plugin loses ability to monitor and communicate with the remote iTunes. Various ways of fiddling in the past have worked:

* Quitting and restarting Music

* Restarting the host Catalina Mac

* Restarting Indigo or the iTunes plugin

And after any of these, then re-authorizing the plugin's remote control in Music.

Recently, however, none of these steps worked any more, After all of them, I still got "failed attempt to pair."

Just now, I did something I hadn't tried before: **disabling the iTunes Plugin** in Indigo for a moment, then reenabling.

Instantly, a pairing attempt worked, and all plugin functionality was restored.

So FWIW, as far as I can tell, once you migrate to an M1 Mac, the plugin won't work at all. I've had various levels of success while on Intel, but once I moved to M1, all hope was lost. Based on the info I have, the plugin won't be updated, and probably own't even be included with an Indigo install anymore.

And also FWIW, the AirFoil plugin works just fine with M1 Macs, so you can still have some degree of control in Indigo. I use that plugin to populate Song/Artist/ and Album info on web pages. I can also perform play/pause FF(next track) and RR(previous Track) functions.

I loved Airfoil until I got stereo paired HomePods. While Rogue Aomeba maintains that stereo pairs are supported, it doesn’t seem to actually work for me. But looks like I should try again!

I THINK they just released a new software that fixes this problem... but don't have any pods so don't know for sure...

Is it possible to have the iTunes plugin upgraded for Python 3 compatibility?

I am sure there are still many users out there that run Indigo on an older computer with a pre BigSur OS. In those cases the iTunes plugin would continue to work just fine with iTunes or Apple Music app and the latest Indigo. This would help us avoiding changing all music-related triggers and scripts etc.

How difficult is it to get Python 3 compatibility?

[jay (support)]

Is it possible to have the iTunes plugin upgraded for Python 3 compatibility?

We have no plans to do so.

Won't the Musickit API provide what we need to do this or is it a payed thing like apple likes to do?

https://developer.apple.com/documentati ... backstatus

If someone was to write a plugin that is

Lee

[jay (support)]

That isn't for generic playback control of the music app. Also, it appears to require an actual compiled app (not a python-based plugin).