The Music N*** is a simple replacement for iTunes, suitable for parties. It lets your guests queue up songs while locking the screen (kiosk mode) and disabling the playback controls. Jonathan Lane drew the icon.

The Music N*** should be able to play iTunes Music Store files (those with DRM), but I haven't tested this because I've never bought any songs from Apple. But I know it won't play over AirTunes since that's a closed feature of iTunes. There are third party ways of getting around this. The Music N*** requires at least MacOS 10.3 (Panther) and it might not be able to read iTunes Library files before iTunes 6.

If you are using an itunes library from a shared disk (i.e. a hard disk from another computer) you have to mount an entire drive at a time, not just (say) your remote home directory. The mount point should look something like /Volumes/Macintosh HD-1/.

For the favorites feature, which lets you pick a default set of songs to play when the user playlist has run dry, you can use quotes around artist names containing spaces, if you are picking more than one artist. For instance to play all songs by blue october and placebo by default, the search string would be:

"blue october" placebo

and you'd click the "or" radio button to include both artists.

If you are like me and have no hip hop music and a guest complains, you can have him bring his CDs in from his car and import them into your iTunes library. Then you can 'Reload iTunes Library' from the 'File' menu (command-R) and the new songs will be available from within The Music N***, without the music ever having to be stopped.

The name refers to someone who is really authoritarian about music, and the application is designed to prevent fights among these people over what songs get played next and over which songs get to be played all the way through. The original name and icon were uncensored, but VersionTracker users complained, so they had to delist it after just 8 hours.

See this pie chart showing the download distribution by country.

As part of kiosk mode (where screen is locked), the Finder is stopped. So make sure you aren't doing any Finder operations (like copying files). When The Music N*** unlocks, the Finder is restarted. If this fails for some reason you can restart the Finder by hand by clicking on the Finder icon in the dock. Stopping the Finder is not good, however the alternatives are worse.

If you like The Music Nazi, you can send me money.

1. Download the compressed file MusicN***.zip
2. Doubleclick the file to decompress it.
3. Use the resulting application, which should be called The Music N***.