Filed under: Audio, Freeware, Internet Tools, iTunes
iConcertCal
I'm normally not a huge fan of iTunes plugins– I was scarred on the whole idea of media player plugins back in my Windows days, but iConcertCal might just get me to re-evaluate that opinion. The free plugin scans the artists in your music library and presents you with a calendar of upcoming concerts in your city by those performers.Unfortunately I haven't been able to get iConcertCal to work perfectly on my machine– the calendar only fills the bottom-left 2/3 of my iTunes window, the calendar over-flows the bounds of the visualizer area a bit, and there is something wrong with the mouse rollovers that causes me to have to mouse about an inch above the item I want to see information about. Your results may vary.
Technical note: Now I'm no programmer or expert on the intricacies of iTunes plugins, but it seems to me that having a plugin that essentially uses the visualizer as a browser is a bit of a hack.
[via Josh Spear]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron MCGrattan said 10:20AM on 2-01-2007
you negated to mention the fact that this plug-in only works if you're within the US.
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Bob S. said 10:25AM on 2-01-2007
This would be a great iCal plugin. I'd actually use iCal.
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Tom said 10:31AM on 2-01-2007
I'm running this. Pretty buggy, but an excellent idea. I'm not sure how it gets your city info - I live in Dayton, OH but it only gives me Cincy concerts. It would be nice to see Columbus as well.
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John Paulo Ambon said 10:54AM on 2-01-2007
Works fine for me. Somehow knew I lived in San Diego. I can finally get rid of one memory hogging OnTour widget. THANKS Mr. LURIE!
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Garrick said 11:13AM on 2-01-2007
Did you miss step 7? "⌘T can be used to switch between iTunes and the calendar" (or CTRL-T on PC)
Works fine for me. Pretty dang cool!
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Erik Moe said 10:57AM on 2-01-2007
I installed this a couple of weeks ago and haven't encountered any of these bugs. Admittedly, I've only checked it about three times, but since I never use iTunes' built-in visualizer and always seem to hear about concerts after they are sold out, this is a great plug in.
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stephen said 11:16AM on 2-01-2007
If the calendar is only displaying in the bottom portion of the screen, this may be because you have the visualizer size set to Medium or Small. If you set it to large (you can do that in Preferences > Advanced > General) then it should fill the window.
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Garrick said 11:19AM on 2-01-2007
Oops, sorry, I think Stephen's hit on the answer.
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cam said 11:22AM on 2-01-2007
I wish you could set a radius for how far to look. I live in San jose and San Francisco (where most of the shows are) isn't included...but a cool plugin all in all.
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rvr said 12:52PM on 2-01-2007
i think creating a local icalendar that you could subscribe to in ical would be a much smoother way to go. a calendar inside itunes is not intuitive, if you ask me. cool idea, though.
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v222sail said 12:13PM on 2-01-2007
To see different cities, in the upper left hand corner, select the city and a cursor will appear at the end of the name. Backspace to delete and type in a new name. A search in the new city will begin.
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chris said 1:15PM on 2-01-2007
I prefer www.sonicliving.com for concert info. Seems to have the fastest notification I've seen and it's free. Great for beating the scalpers.
I wouldn't rely on this plugin working for the long term seeing how it's a visualizer plugin
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Mike said 12:50PM on 2-01-2007
THere's also a Widget that scans your iTunes library for artists and pops up tour dates. It shows you all bands playing you area, but with anybody you have listed in iTunes at the top of the list. It's called OnTour. You can check other areas of the world too, of course.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/music/ontour.html
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Jon said 12:58PM on 2-01-2007
It kept crashing my itunes, I uninstalled it
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hobo05 said 3:35PM on 2-01-2007
Great concept. Bad implimentation. Crashes Itunes every time I start program.
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Greg said 4:38PM on 2-01-2007
OMG, that's awesome. A little ghetto that it's a "visualizer," but very convenient and fast to just hit Apple-T in iTunes, and there's the calendar...with links to Pollstar or the venue!
Greg
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Rich said 1:31AM on 2-02-2007
Crashed itunes every 10-20 seconds for me.
Uninstalled an the problem is gone.
Great idea, but not at this price.
R
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Brandon said 1:27PM on 2-21-2007
Hi, I'm one of the developers of iConcertCal. I'd just like to post an update. The new version 1.1 includes a radius search, supports international shows, and has fixed a lot of the iTunes crashes we've been seeing. So give the new one a try and let us know what you think!
Thanks,
-Brandon
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