Timeshifting Interactive Blog

One of the great things about digital formats is being able to easily group and find all of your music and video. iTunes combined with Remote.app on iOS devices (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) works really well for selecting and playing music around the home or office. Music playback doesn’t need much processing power, so any old PC or laptop can be repurposed for the task, or it can be added to a pre-existing server.

Add a couple of AirPort Express base stations for AirTunes and you can control both music selection and multiple sets of speakers from the iPhone. AirPorts can just be setup to join an existing network, rather than creating their own, to provide an additional set of speakers to send music to.

The main problem with iTunes is it’s not really designed to run as a server application. For example you must log in and run the app after every restart, a necessity for Windows Update. Admittedly you could set the computer in question to auto-login and add iTunes to the startup group, nor is it even practical if the computer in question is an office server as well.

It is, however, possible to successfully run iTunes as a service. The trick is to use a service wrapper utility called SrvAny from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. This runs when the computer starts up and starts iTunes as a service in the background. We set up a separate user account for iTunes and SrvAny to run under, and set permissions on this account to lock it down so it could only access the music files. To set up iTunes as a Service, copy ‘srvany.exe’ to c:\windows\system32, add the following to the registry (customising for your system as necessary), and then in the Service to login as ‘iTunesServer’:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\itunesservice]
"Type"=dword:00000010
"Start"=dword:00000002
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000001
"ImagePath"="C:\\Windows\\System32\\Srvany.exe"
"DisplayName"="iTunes (Media Server)"
"ObjectName"="NT Authority\\LocalService"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\itunesservice\Parameters]
"Application"="C:\\Program Files\\iTunes\\iTunes.exe"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\itunesservice\Enum]
"0"="Root\\LEGACY_ITUNESSERVICE\\0000"
"Count"=dword:00000001
"NextInstance"=dword:00000001

This has been tested on a Windows 2008 Server here, but should work fine on any version of Windows, desktop or server. If you need to access the iTunes UI for any reason, stop the service and run the app interactively from the ‘iTunesServer’ user account.

The other minor annoyance of iTunes is the speaker list that comes up in Remote.app. You can specify a name for AirTunes speakers, but the ones attached the computer iTunes is running on are always called ‘My Computer’. Fortunately this can be customised too by editing the iTunes localisation file. Locate the file below (selecting the correct .lproj folder for your language):

Windows:
c:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.Resources\en.lproj\Localizable.strings

MacOS:
/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings

And search for string ‘163.035’ (without quotes)—that is the name for the built-in speakers. Change it to whatever you want. In iTunes 10 and newer the localisation files are commented, so it’s easier to find and edit these text strings.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 1st, 2010 at 9:26 am and is filed under Information Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.