Related link: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
My longest standing annoyance with iTunes is that you have to manually intervene every single time a 30 second sound clip ends. Continuous preview sure would be nice, wouldn’t it? Since iTunes 5 still didn’t offer a preferences option to take care of this, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands.
Below you’ll find a simple AppleScript that takes care of business through some UI scripting. (I’ve always felt that UI scripts are sloppy, but this was about all I could think of — and it was easy.) The only disclaimer that’s due is that if you switch out of iTunes while previewing an album, iTunes will pop back up every time a new song starts. That’s not so helpful if you’re working, but you won’t even notice if you’re just sitting back and taking in the tunes.
Oh, and before I go, let me put in a plug for Coldplay’s new iTunes-exclusive Fix You EP that you can find on the front page of the music store. If for some unfathomable reason you don’t like Coldplay, you can still feel good about paying $3 for it because 100% of the proceeds go to hurricane relief. How cool is that?
Without further adieu, here’s the goods.
Feel free to modify and post it back up as you please.
Anyone else have any good UI hacks lying around?
Another option: iTunesMSP
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11955
Here's one I rolled a while ago
...its only failing is that it seems (or seemed) impossible to tell when you are at the end of a playlist in the store so the script will carry on repeating the last song ad infinitum. You have to kill the script to stop playing.
(* iTunes preview script *)
on idle
tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
set idleTime to 2
else
next track
play
set idleTime to 32
end if
end tell
return idleTime
end idle
iTunes Music Store Player
The AppleScript iTunes Music Store Player (http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=itunesmsp) plays all the tracks listed in the Music Store window without having to click on each one manually.
Here's one I rolled a while ago
Whew, so it's not just me who found the music store non-continuous preview annoying enough to do something about it! Now if only Apple would do it the "right" way.
If you take a look at the source for the one I wrote, it takes care of your ad infinitum problem by soliciting user input -- And I do like the way you circumvented the ugliness of UI scripting with some more orthodox AppleScript (if there is such a thing.)
But that's good stuff. Thanks for sharing...I guess I could've looked at the iTunes script dictionary before sending keystrokes. In case anyone doesn't know how to do that, you can open up Script Editor and choose it on the main menu. It's pretty helpful if you need a quick run down of how an app can be scripted.
Thanks
iTunes Music Store Player
Ahhh. The joys of duplicated labor... :)