Quicksilver Adulation 1: iTunes is Telepathic

I am not alone in saying that a Mac without Quicksilver is hardly a Mac at all. It is a program that is difficult to describe because it does so much. At heart it is an application launcher, but it can manipulate so much more.

I once waxed on to a colleague who asked what Quicksilver has done for me:

It has made iTunes telepathic. It has replaced my dock when my hands are on the mouse or keyboard. It records my every thought and moves it to the right container. And everyday I learn about something else it can do.

The fellow immediately demanded that I qualify my comments, something neither of us had the time for. Hence, this blog.

For those of you that don’t know what Quicksilver is, I suggest looking over the list below. These are great sites for getting started:

• The Apple Blog’s: Quicksilver changes everything.
• Merlin’s: Quicksilver: Grab a copy and play along at home.
• Dan Dickinson’s: A better OS in just ten minutes.

Since most of what I’m going to be talking about are triggers, I also suggest you read Dan’s excellent explanation of them here.

Today’s adulation: iTunes reads my mind.

There are many freeware apps out there that allow us to control iTunes without going to iTunes. There are hotkeys, menu bars, floating widgets. Many of them offer some of the functionality Quicksilver can. But since we use Quicksilver for so much else, why not this as well? For those of you that already have Quicksilver doing some iTunes control, skip “The Basics” and move to “The Awesome.”

The Basics

First thing we want to do is control tracks without changing what we’re doing. For this we make a series of Quicksilver triggers. Stated briefly, anything you can do with Quicksilver can be made into a trigger, which can be mapped to a hotkey or mouse corner to execute automatically.

Quicksilver’s iTunes module comes with scripts to control iTunes already, so all we have to do is make triggers out of them.

Here we have made the script “Next Song” into a trigger. To do this we clicked the plus at the bottom of the Triggers window in Quicksilver’s preferences and at the primer-like prompt began typing”next song” until it came up. Run is the action we want so we hit “Save”

Next we need to give it a key mapping. We double click on the “Trigger” column to bring up the following shelf.

We click the Hot Key field and press Command-Option-Right Arrow.

And that’s it! From now on, whenever we hit that combination of keys, iTunes will go to the next track. So when your writing a paper, blog, or otherwise engaged you don’t have to break flow in order to skip a track.

We repeat the process with the following scripts and key mappings.

• Previous Song gets Command-Option-Left Arrow
• Play/Pause gets Command-Option-Space

The Even More Basic
So long GrowlTunes

Some of us are fans of Growl, a notification framework that can unobtrusively handle notifications from many different programs. Growl comes with a program that will make Growl notifications for our iTunes tracks. Likewise there are many programs, GimmeSomeTune for example, that provide this functionality without Growl. Again though,if we’re using Quicksilver, and Growl, there’s no need for the extra program.

Just go to the iTunes section of the Preferences and select “Monitor Recent Tracks” and “Display Track Notifications.” You can then go to your Growl preferences and chose which growl style you want the notifications to come from.

The Awesome

Okay, so we’ve got iTunes well controlled. While I’m blogging in Flock, I can start and stop iTunes, skip or replay tracks, and have a sexy “what’s playing” notification when the tracks change, all without break the flow of my work.

But you know how when you’re listening to iTunes on shuffle while you’re hard at work and hearing one random song puts you in the mood to listen to another song? What do you do? You have to break flow, switch to iTunes, find the song and play it. That’s so much mousing, most of us pass the opportunity by.

With one simple trigger all that can change. With the iTunes module you can Quicksilver an item called “Browse Tracks.” This is essentially a catalog item that has all of your tracks. Make the following trigger:

Map this to a key combo, I use Command-Option-b, and it will bring up a seemingly normal Quicksilver window that searches only your tracks. Bring it up, starting typing the first few letters of the track you feel like hearing, hit enter, and BAM, it’s on.

You can do this with other categories as well. I have a Browse Artists Trigger mapped to Command-Option-a, for when I get the urge to here someone as opposed to something.

Even Better…

If you’re like me, you listen to iTunes in shuffle play (sometimes limited to playlists) most of the time. This allows us to be like a live DJs while we’re listening, programing our listening as we go. With the Browse Tracks Trigger, that becomes much more dynamic and doesn’t involve breaking our attention from whatever else we’re doing. Let’s bring it up a notch.

Rather than listening to your library with shuffle on, get in the habit of listening to the Party Shuffle. This is the same as shuffling, except it selects the first 15 or so songs ahead of time. If you do this you’ll want to modify your Browse Track habits to use the action “Play in Party Shuffle” when you get the urge to hear a song out of the blue.

But what about if you get the urge to hear a song, but don’t want to interrupt the song you’re listening too? Ordinarily you’d have to keep that in your head until the song finishes. If you’re listening to the Party Shuffle though, bring up your Browse Tracks Trigger and modify the action a little bit.

“Play Next in Party Shuffle” adds the track to the playlist after the one you’re currently hearing. So you can add it and forget it!

Concluding Thoughts

So there you have it. With Quicksilver, iTunes can be telepathic. You’re working on something listening to your tunes on the Party shuffle. A song that doesn’t fit the mood comes on. Without breaking flow (and after a few weeks, without even thinking about it) you skip the track. A song plays that you really like. Without breaking flow, you play it again. A song (or something else) reminds you of a song you’d like to hear. Without breaking flow, it’s playing. You realize the perfect follow up to the tune you’re currently jamming to. In about the space that it takes to have that thought, you’ve slated it to play next.

Truly this is an example of Quicksilver’s motto Act without Doing.

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