I just bought a new disc today. I would say that it’s a Compact Disc, but you see, it’s actually not. It’s got some kind of copy protection on it that makes it conform to the standard just poorly enough that CD players can read it, but computer drives cannot. For those of you wondering, it’s Closure’s self-titled album. I heard they rocked, so I bought their album. That’s how I do things. But you see, this piece of polycarbonate plastic is worthless to me. I don’t even own a standard CD player. I have my computer and my iPod. That’s how I listen to music.

Needless to say that Closure is dead to me, but I’ve also considered other forms of retribution. I thought I could go through the trouble of actually getting the contents off the disc (it can be done of course, it’s just a pain in the ass that I don’t have time for) and then posting it to every torrent tracker I can find. What would that do, though? It would give a greater listenership to this band, increase their popularity, and end up resulting in more CD sales. Boy, that would be terrible for them. No, instead I’m just posting this blog entry to remind others not to by CDs unless you actually see that CD logo on the front. My new CD doesn’t have it, and no other CD that pulls this kind of crap is legally allowed to either.

I used Foobar 2000 for years before finally giving in a switching to iTunes. I sacrificed a lot of cool features in the move, but did get seamless integration with my iPod and a less buggy environment, which ultimately, is worth it. However, one feature I really missed was the ability to press a combination of keys to play, pause of switch songs any time my music app is running (this is what’s called a “global hotkey”).

Luckily, this can be done with iTunes with the help of HoeKey. Yea, it’s a weird name, but it works. Just download the program, then add these configuration lines:

=Rem|-- iTunes --

~Z=Msg|iTunes|793|0|786432 ; previous song
~X=Msg|iTunes|793|0|917504 ; play/pause
~C=Msg|iTunes|793|0|720896 ; next song

and you’re done!