SMorg

Ok, this isn’t much but maybe someone will find it useful. Since Spotify doesn’t work with most media keyboards and setting up global keys for menu items doesn’t seem to be possible either, here’s a little floating toolbar you can use to access Previous, Next tracks as well as Play/Pause.

Like I said – it’s rather simple and ugly. But it’s small enough to put near your Dock or Menubar so you can at least get to it in a hurry. I rally don’t think the need for it will last long, as the service gets more popular -they’ll eventually make it more user friendly I’m sure. So I likely won’t bother to make any improvements – but if I do, I’ll update here.

To use Controlify:

• Download this file.
• Unzip it.
• Put ‘Controlify.app’ in your applications folder or somewhere else permanent.
• You can then either launch it separately from Spotify, or launch Controlify first (it should launch Spotify if it isn’t already open).

This should work on any modern Intel Mac system, from 10.5 to Lion. Feel free to report any issues below.

So there is a new album out, a compilation of 76 artists covering Bob Dylan called Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan (Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International), for Amnesty International. We’re talking about every major track he’s done, as well as some more subtle stuff. REAL music, played by real artists. And others…

These are the top reviews of it – thank the Gods for Miley Cyrus covering Dylan – maybe now he’ll get some recognition.

Repost from a couple years ago…I still love this video.

So, a lot of my work involves clicking back and forth, and it’s a pain to reach for the Remote or keyboard when I want to skip a track in iTunes. I have a Logitech mouse (actually, about a half dozen of them), so I figured I’d assign one of its buttonst to make the process easier.

Sadly, that’s not an option in the Logitech software, but launching an application is; so I put together a quick little app to do nothing but play the next track. I then told Logitech Control Center to launch the app when a specific button on the mouse was pressed.

It’s simple, but it works perfectly. If you want to build your own, open Applescript Editor and paste the following in, then save it as an application.

tell application “iTunes”

next track

end tell

Or you can simply download my version, here. Enjoy.

If you want to use it with LCC, select the button and choose the app in the resulting dialog:

Automation is fun. Use this script to:

• Rate the current playing track in iTunes as a ’5′.
• Scrobble and ‘Love’ it on Last.FM

Then use my recipe on IFTTT.com to send the Last.FM ‘Love’ to Twitter. Yoink – you’re now annoying the world.

-- This oh-so-simple little app was made by Scott McDaniel
-- Twitter: @mcdev
-- web: scottmcdaniel.org

tell application "iTunes"
	set rating of current track to 100
end tell

tell application "System Events"
	-- Get the frontmost process
	set active_proc to name of the first process whose frontmost is true
	-- Open Last.fm window
	activate application "Dock"
	tell process "Dock"
		click UI element "Last.fm" of list 1
	end tell
	delay 0.5
	-- Click on the relevant menu item and close the window
	tell process "Last.fm"
		click menu item "Love" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Tools" of menu bar 1
		tell application "System Events" to set visible of process "Last.fm" to false
	end tell
	-- Restore frontmost process
	set frontmost of process active_proc to true
end tell

tell application "System Events"
	set isRunning to (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0
end tell

if isRunning then
	tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp"

		set the allNotificationsList to ¬
			{"iRate"}
		set the enabledNotificationsList to ¬
			{"iRate"}
		register as application ¬
			"iRate" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
			default notifications enabledNotificationsList ¬
			icon of application "iTunes"

		notify with name ¬
			"iRate" title ¬
			"iRate" description ¬
			"This track has been iRated as 5 star & sent to Twitter!" application name "iRate"

	end tell
end if