More on Hands-Free iTunes Tuning

Inspired by the combination of AppleScript and Quicksilver, I cooked up a hands-free way to skip tracks in my playlist without activating the iTunes application or taking my hands off the keyboard. Then it occured to me that I could combine this with the iTunes track rating system to ‘tune’ my iTunes playlists on-the-fly to play the tracks I like more often when the “Play higher rated songs more often” box is checked. So I made two more scripts:

Yum:

tell application "iTunes"
	set thisTrack to current track
	set new_rating to (thisTrack's rating) + 20
	set thisTrack's rating to new_rating as integer
end tell

and Yuk:

tell application "iTunes"
	set thisTrack to current track
	set new_rating to (thisTrack's rating)--20
	set thisTrack's rating to new_rating as integer
	next track
end tell

compiled them as applications, and popped them in my Applications folder. After a Quicksilver refresh, I can now yum the songs I like, adding one star, and yuk the songs I don’t like, demoting them by one star and moving on to the next song. Eventually, this should help teach iTunes about what I want to hear when shuffling through large playlists. All without ever having to take iTunes out of background mode. How easy was that?