Saturday, March 07, 2009

Simple applescript for playing music in iTunes

In addition to make skype video calls I thought it would be nice to give my kids some control over playing music on the iMac. So, a new rfid tag was assigned to following simple applescript:

tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
stop
else
set the view of the front browser window to playlist "kertun musaa"
set myNumberOfTracks to number of tracks in playlist "kertun musaa"
set randomTrack to (random number (myNumberOfTracks - 1)) + 1
play track randomTrack of user playlist "kertun musaa"
end if
end tell

So when the tag is shown to the reader the script either
  • stops the playback if itunes is playing a something, or
  • if nothing is playing, starts a play a random song in a named playlist
The script would've been even more simple if iTunes would allow setting the current playlist. Then I could've used the native shuffle mode of the player.

Using applescript one can do almost anything on iTunes. A good source for further information is http://dougscripts.com/itunes/

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Awesome post! You helped me solve my prob...thx!!