multi-music-app

These scripts allow you to play, pause, go to previous and next track in whichever music app you are currently (or were last) listening in. By default, this will check for Music (formerly iTunes) and Spotify, but other music playing apps can be easily supported.

Using in Alfred

This was primarily designed to be called from an Alfred workflow, such a workflow is provided under the alfred directory. To run in Alfred, you can just download the workflow file and load into alfred. See https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/ for more on adding workflows

Shortcut keys

• pp - play/pause current music app
• pn - play next track in current music app
• pr - play previous track in current music app
• ssp - pause the current music app (if playing) and start the screen saver

Using from Command line

You can also run this from the commandline via osascript.

First, you need to compile the applescripts (one time only). Just run:

make

You should then see core.scpt and config.scpt in the directory

You can then use the individual interface scripts to perform commands, for example:

osascript ./playpause.applescript

Configuration

In multiMusicAppConfig.applescript, there are a few configuration options:

# the file to store state information in
property stateFile: "/tmp/multiMusicApp.plist"

# set the default app. This is the app that will start playing if no previous app
# can be identified, or if it's been more than the TTL time since another app was used
property defaultApp: "Music"

# set other music apps here, comma separated
property otherApps: {"Spotify"}

# How long (in seconds) to continue interacting with previous app
# If the lastApp was updated more than this many seconds ago, disregard it and return the default app
property ttl: (60 * 60)

Files

File	Description
alfred/multi music app.alfredworkflow	Alfred workflow package. This contains all the other (precompiled) scripts.
alfred/icon.png	Icon file for alfred
Makefile	makefile
multiMusicApp.applescript	The main guts of the script. Compiled to core.scpt
multiMusicAppConfig.applescript	Configuration file. Compiled to config.scpt
next.applescript pause.applescript playpause.applescript previous.applescript	Scripts providing interfaces to the app functions