iTunes Veto: avoid those overplayed new songs

Posted June 16th, 2009
by Chris
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I listen to a stream of The Current almost all day, every day. I love this station, but I cringe every time they play that new Green Day song or when I hear Bono sing, well, anything. No longer! I’ve written a set of Ruby scripts that’ll let me veto away the ugliness so that I’ll never get nasty songs stuck in my head again.

I should point out that these scripts assume you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 with Developer Tools installed. Both scripts use the osx/cocoa library to interact with iTunes.

veto

the veto script pulls the track title that iTunes is currently streaming and appends it to ~/.itunes_vetoes_songs.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX
OSX.require_framework 'ScriptingBridge'

itunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes")
`echo "#{itunes.currentStreamTitle}" >> ~/.itunes_vetoed_songs`

veto_watcher

veto_watcher runs in the background and looks for vetoes songs to appear the iTunes stream. When they do, it turns down the volume and spares your ears. When the vetoed track is done, the volume goes back up. Note: this should return the volume to it’s previous setting, but the instance variable kept breaking, so it just goes back up to 100% — careful!

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

# start a new thread
pid = fork do

  require 'osx/cocoa'
  include OSX
  OSX.require_framework 'ScriptingBridge'

  @itunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes")

  def itunes_is_running?
    return !`ps -A -o comm | grep iTunes.app`.empty?
  end

  def mute
    @itunes.soundVolume = 0 if @itunes.soundVolume > 0
  end

  def unmute
    @itunes.soundVolume = 100 if @itunes.soundVolume == 0
  end

  def check_for_veto
    vetoes = `cat ~/.itunes_vetoed_songs`.split("\n")

    if vetoes.index(@itunes.currentStreamTitle)
      mute
    elsif @itunes.soundVolume == 0
      unmute
    end
  end

  # main loop: check for a veto every 5 seconds
  loop do
    check_for_veto if itunes_is_running?
    sleep(5)
  end

end

Process.detach(pid)

I have the veto_watcher script start up when I log in and I’ve set up a Quicksilver trigger to run the veto script. What’s up now, Bono?

The
House
of Ding.