I recently rebuild my machine at work and put iTunes on it. My machine worked a lot faster, but the play, pause, forward and back buttons on my keyboard did not work anymore with iTunes (it works with Windows Media Player). I managed to get it to work before, but I could not remember how. So I went Googling around and found iTunes Scripts from Maximized Software.
iTunes scripts is a set of scripts that control iTunes. The scripts that I'm interested in are PlayPause, Stop, Previous and Next. These correspond to the keys on my multimedia keyboard. All that was left to do was to use the keyboard's software to bind those keys to the corresponding scripts. Now it's all sorted.
And while we're on the whole topic of iTunes, I found out yesterday that MSN Messenger 7 supports iTunes in its new “What I'm listening to” feature. I was seriously impressed. But knowing Microsoft's track record for compatibility with third party software, I'm wondering whether this was deliberate or some freak coincidence. I've read an article before that there was a concern at a stage at Microsoft that many of its employees prefer iPods to the Windows Media Player compatible devices. They would therefore use iTunes because Windows Media Player is not compatible with the iPod. (By the way - is there something that we can do about that?) Maybe the MSN Messenger team put it in to suit their own private needs - who knows. But be that as it may, MSN Messenger 7's iTunes support is uber cool.