iTunes plays and organizes your music, but it doesn't give you a quick and easy way to get full control over your music-listening experience. That's where Quicksilver comes in. Using this plug-in, Quicksilver allows you to search your music by artist, album, genre, playlist, track name, or all of the above. It skips to the next or previous track, pauses, changes playlists, and even queues up tracks in the party shuffle, all without ever using the iTunes window.

After installing the plug-in you'll be able to browse your iTunes Library the way you browse your file system.

To start browsing, activate Quicksilver and begin typing itunes to select iTunes, then press the right arrow key. You'll be presented with this result list:

This is fairly self explanatory. Each of these have contents that can be browsed in a similar way to the iPod or in iTunes itself. You can even view the contents of individual tracks to see the genre, artist and album that the track belongs to. On any item you can choose from these actions:

• Play Plays the selection immediately. If the selection is not part of a playlist, it will create a new playlist called Quicksilver
• Add to End of Party Shuffle Adds the selection to the end of the party shuffle
• Play in Party Shuffle Plays the selection immediately in the party shuffle
• Play Next in Party Shuffle Adds the selection immediately after the currently playing track in the party shuffle

The iTunes Plug-In also comes with several scripts to control iTunes: Play, Pause, Play-Pause, Stop, Next Track, and Previous Track. The Play-Pause script is equivalent to pressing the space bar while iTunes is active. Though each of these scripts may be accessible by typing the name (e.g. next for Next Track), you may find it more useful to use keyboard triggers or mouse triggers to control iTunes.

The iTunes Plug-In preferences allow you to customize the behavior of the plug-in.

• Quicksilver
• iTunes

• Occasionally the Quicksilver cache gets out of date - restart Quicksilver and iTunes to fix it
• Triggers involving smart playlists occasionally need to be reset
• If you're using an iTunes version earlier than 4.7, this plug-in will poll iTunes for track changes. This may have a performance impact on your system. iTunes 4.7 posts notifications to any apps that want to listen, such as iTunesMonitor, the app this plug-in uses to track changes
• Track art in ID3 2.2 tags will not be used. Upgrade the tags to 2.3 or higher. To do this, select the tracks in iTunes, then open the Advanced menu, and choose “Convert ID3 Tags…”.

This add-on may be freely distributed. It is not guaranteed to work (though it has been extensively tested), and you use it at your own risk. Post suggestions in the forums.