Mac Forum / Programming / Mac Programming / July 2005

I'm finishing up developing a speech control jukebox.  I've scoured
"iTunes COM Interface Documentation 4.9.0.17" (for windows) and cannot
determine a way to tell the browser to select a genre, artist, or
album.  I am using Microsoft Visual C++ to develop a windows mfc
application.  When I speak "open genre classical" I want the Itunes
browser windows to select that genre.  I would also like to do the
same for artists and albums.

I would expect the Itunes api to have a select genre function.  The
only way I can think of now to select a genre in the genre column of
the browser window is to send a mouse click to it then send a sequence
of keystrokes to select the genre.  I don't think I can stomach this
hack.

My speech recognition app can now tell Itunes 4.9 to play, pause, and
stop.  When my app loads it reads all 14,000 songs in my collection in
7 seconds from the Itunes xml file - "iTunes Music Library.xml" (my
hardware is athlon 2000, 7200rpm udma WD, 1gb ram.)  

After getting this far I thought the rest would be easy.  I'm about
ready to switch back to using winamp.  Apple's Itunes api appears to
be incomplete and clear as mud.  Up until now I thought Apple made a
good api for Itunes, but why isn't there some function like this:
browserWindow->SelectGenre(genre).  I wonder if the Itunes api for OS
X also incomplete.

Can anyone here tell me how to tell the Itunes browser window to
select genres, artists, and albums?  Does anyone know who to ask?

Thanks,
Jeff