Fix your iTunes 4.x

Are you one of the windows people who hates using Itunes 5 or 6 because it renames the music when it saves to your iPod as a random 4-letter + extension (exp: XFDA.m4a)? This makes things even more difficult when you try to rebuild your music library from your iPod because iTunes 5+ not only changed the name of the file but also removed the title from the META-DATA. You have all your music, all 4325 tracks but you have only album, artist, and track number. So the fix for this you use iTunes 4.(in my case)8, but out of the "box" installs of the 4.x series of iTunes has the "old" QuickTime and cannot talk to your co-workers "new" iTunes to listen to there music that they share and they keep e-mailing you about how they can't listen to your collection any more.

As a note iTunes 4.3 and lower did not work for this solution, I have only had luck with this from Version 4.7 and higher. I have not tested 4.6 or 4.5.

Here is how you can continue to use your preferred iTunes 4.8 and let everyone else listen to your music while you "listen" to theirs.

Apple has been kind enough to provide you the tools it just took me some rooting around.

First, upgrade your QuickTime.

But you say, "When I download QuickTime from Apple it has iTunes with it already!" That is true for the main link for http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html.

What you really want is this http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime703.html, oh yes this is what you want. It gives you the h.264 video support and all the rest of any of newer optimized codex, and it does not change your iTunes version to boot. This just helps out when you want to watch movie previews and when you encode(rip) your CD's. The windows link is at the bottom of the page.

Now how do you get that pesky "this version does not work with your iTunes" when you try to listen to BOB in accountings shared music. Here you go, http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows102.html, this little piece of magic will update what is know as an mDNS responder. This is what advertises your share and allows you to discover others shares in iTunes. And no you do not need the Printer part of the install.

As long a your firewall ports are right on your computer, You can now share music from and with others that already upgraded to iTunes 6 or your graphics arts department that has all of there PowerBooks automatically upgraded.

hope this helps,

MG