iTunes 7 is out and it supports gapless playback. The bad news is this only works on 5th generation iPods (see this Apple support article). Boooo, the chances of this being rolled out to older iPods, somewhere around zero I’d guess.

I never found an elegant solution for getting last.fm submissions from the iPod, but jscrob2 seems perfect. It’s a plugin for iTunes that submits anything you listen to in iTunes but also submits anything you played on the iPod when you sync it up.

Click here for the jscrob2 website

Update [14th June] - the above link is dead, but I found another site with the plugin download

SMS Toolkit is a Java based GUI for interacting with mobile phones. It’s main purpose is to send, receive and read SMS messages. It uses the SMSLib API so is compatible with most phones available assuming there is a means to connect them to the PC (Cable, Bluetooth, IrDA), but see this post at the SMSLib forums for details of tested phones. Summary of Features:

• View the status and information about your phone/device.
• Compose and send SMS messages
• Reading, deleting, forwarding and replying to SMS messages
• Command console for interacting with the phone directly via AT commands

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So yet again iTunes starts up and complains - The file “iTunes Library.itl” does not appear to be a valid music library file. iTunes has attempted to recover your music library and renamed this file to
“iTunes Library (Damaged).itl” blah, blah.

Oh, well I thought, it does this ALL the time, and after 15 mins of disk grinding and thrashing the CPU it rebuilds the library. Ooooohhh no, not this time.

It’s all gone, every sodding MP3 from my library. I think spending all day recreating my library of 5000+ MP3 is a good way to spend my time, and even  after doing all that I’ve still lost all my track ratings and playcounts. thanks Apple for the quality and well tested software that is iTunes.

Why the Apple developers decided it would be a good idea to keep the iTunes library in two places - a binary file (.itl) and a XML file, is beyond me. Just one more thing to go wrong and get out of sync if you ask me (but then I’m not the god like genius that the Apple developers are). BTW, I’m not alone in this problem as a Google search throws up thousands of hits for this problem (no solutions or causes though)