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Need help with accessing UpNext in iTunes though the win32::ole("iTunes.Application")

I am writing a program in Perl to access the currently playing track in iTunes for Windows and to get the next 3 songs that iTunes will play. I have the code to get the currently playing song. But I cannot find a way to get the next 3 songs.

I would be open to alternate languages such as Ruby if you know of a way to do this.

Here is my simple Perl code to get the current playing track. I need help getting the next 3 songs
#!C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe

use strict;
use Win32::OLE;

my $iTunesApp = new Win32::OLE("iTunes.Application");
my $track = $iTunesApp->CurrentTrack;

print "Current Track: " . $track->Name . "\nCurrent Artist: " . $track->Artist . "\n"

Darrell Porter

The COM object has a number of properties, enumerated here with examples.

I would specifically look at CurrentPlaylist to compare the CurrentTrack to determine what the next 3 tracks are, if there are three tracks left to play.

I found this by Googling for

itunes windows com object properties

I hope this helps.

aa-denver

ASKER

Thanks for the suggestion. I have found and downloaded the Apple SDK for Windows OLE. At this point I need help understanding how to get the objects. I was able to get the name of the currently playing track (as before) and the name of the currently targeted playlist (code below). But now I am stuck trying to pull the tracks for the playlist. I would appreciate any insight you have into using the OLE methods, objects, or hierarchy.

Here is my current code. All of the last 3 lines produce errors (I have commented them out with #)

#!C:\Perl64\bin\perl.exe
use strict;
use Win32::OLE;
my $iTunesApp = new Win32::OLE("iTunes.Application");
my $track = $iTunesApp->CurrentTrack;
print "Current Track: " . $track->Name . "\nCurrent Artist: " . $track->Artist . "\n";
my $list = $iTunesApp->CurrentPlaylist;
print "Current Playlist: " . $list->Name . "\n";

#my $tracklist = $iTunesApp->SelectedTracks;
#print "Tracks: " . $tracklist->Item . "\n";
#Print "$tracklist" ;

Here is the output from above.
c:\itunes\iTuPlay>c:\perl64\bin\perl.exe ituplay.pl
Current Track: Blues Is My Business (And Business Is Good) _West-Coast-Swing
Current Artist: The Groove Hogs
Current Playlist: Perl test

Here are the errors when the lines are not commented out:
c:\itunes\iTuPlay>c:\perl64\bin\perl.exe ituplay.pl
String found where operator expected at ituplay.pl line 19, near "Print "$trackl
ist""
(Do you need to predeclare Print?)
syntax error at ituplay.pl line 19, near "Print "$tracklist""
Execution of ituplay.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

Here is some information from the SDK. I need help understanding how to use it.
IITSource::Playlists().

IITTrackCollection Interface Reference

Detailed Description
Represents a collection of track objects.
Note that collection indices are always 1-based.

You can retrieve all the tracks defined for a playlist using IITPlaylist::Tracks().

You can retrieve the currently selected track or tracks using IiTunes::SelectedTracks().

HRESULT Count ([out, retval] long *count)
Returns the number of tracks in the collection.

HRESULT Item ([in] long index,[out, retval] IITTrack **iTrack)
Returns an IITTrack object corresponding to the given index (1-based).

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Darrell Porter

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Need help with accessing UpNext in iTunes though the win32::ole(&quot;iTunes.Application&quot;)

Need help with accessing UpNext in iTunes though the win32::ole("iTunes.Application")