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30 Most Recent RSS FeedPlay Selected Track and Cue Next
A Correspondent inquired about a script that would play a selected track in iTunes through to the end and then stop and then select the next track but not play it. In such a way, a playlist containing sequential musical cues required for a theatrical performance could be fired one track at a time, via the script, without a lot of stopping and mouse-clicking and swearing backstage ("Up yer scrim!", "Purple behind!").
This is such a script:
-- Play Selected Track and Cue Next
tell application "iTunes"
-- get the single selected track and play it
set theSelection to selection
if length of theSelection is 1 then
set theTrack to item 1 of theSelection
try
play theTrack with once
on error
## beep
return
end try
-- the selected track is playing, now do some other stuff...
-- get the playlist
set thePlaylist to (get view of front window)
-- stash current fixed indexing value
set curfi to fixed indexing
-- we want free indexing not fixed indexing
set fixed indexing to false
-- compute next track's index
set idx to (get index of theTrack)
if (idx = (count of tracks of thePlaylist)) then
set idx to 1
else
set idx to (idx + 1)
end if
-- select the next track in the playlist
reveal track idx of thePlaylist
-- restore fixed indexing to whatever it was before
set fixed indexing to curfi
end if
end tell
What you'd want to do is save this with Script Editor, named whatever you like, with a File Format of "Script" and put it in your [Home]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder so it appears in iTunes' Script menu.
Prepare a playlist and select its first track. When it's time to actually play the track, don't use any iTunes play controls; instead, fire the script. The script will play the selected track, figure out which track is next in sequence, select it, and then quit. iTunes will stop when the current track has finished by virtue of that with once parameter on the play command. When it's time to play the next track, which is now the selected track, fire the script to play it and select the next track. And so on.
While assigning this script a keyboard shortcut will be convenient if you can keep a hand near the keyboard, something that could fire this via a physical remote control would be super boss. Under such circumstances, you may prefer—or it may be necessary—to save the script with a File Format of "Application".
