Random Album

January 16th, 2008 by Luke | Posted in Downloads |

After two years, I’ve finally obtained my Holy Grail, and in the process of doing so, proven to my father that not only am I a capable adventurer, but that I’ve finally forgiven him.

Um. See, I never listen to songs in iTunes. Ever. I wouldn’t notice if my albums were single, continuous tracks. If I arrive at a song that I’m dissatisfied with, the album is over. *Next Album*.

Comprehension point 2: my library. It’s incomprehensibly huge (albeit meticulously tagged and organized). And I add to it whenever I can, so my list of “albums to listen to” rapidly overflows all buffers in my brain. Thus, I don’t even try to remember what I want to listen to; I leave it to chance.

iTunes, the behemoth, serves me very well in this regard, thanks to a nice flexibility of listening preferences, and a handy obscurely-documented feature: [alt/option]-Next Track (or right arrow). Combined with Preferences>Playback>Shuffle>Albums, I live in a dreamy album-world every day.

But the iTunes interface is a bit overkill for such simple functionality; I don’t like switching to the app every time I want to skip albums (and the always-on-top mini-player view is too distracting). So I looked to remotes, expecting them to have enough attention to detail to have replicated the option-Next Track feature. Synergy: No. Menuet: No. Coversutra: Neh. All nice apps (a particular nod to Menuet for elegance and Coversutra for polish), with lots of great features (especially Coversutra), but pretty much useless for my habit.

And I think I know why: Apple doesn’t expose their next-album message in iTunes’ AppleScript Dictionary. So, for years, I’ve just dealt, letting the irritation build up inside of me, to eventually be poured over helpless readers in a far-too-long blog post. But today, ladies and gentlemen, today I did not back down. Yes, at this shining moment, I proudly present to you:

Random Album (drop into ~/Library/Scripts)

There she is. The stuff of dreams. Assigned to a Quicksilver trigger¹, a flick of the fingers discards both a band and their semi-yearly product of toil. Fin

Thanks to Doug’s AppleScripts for the (view of front window) method (it means the script will work with whatever’s currently showing in iTunes).

¹Other options FastScripts, Butler, LaunchBar, and the Script Menulet (Applescript Utility.app>Show Script Menu in menu bar