Play Snippets of Each Track in a Playlist
Sample a section of each track in a specified playlist.
Back in my early radio days (in the early 1980s, before CDs!) the DJs and Music Director at the radio station would receive tons of promotional albums from record companies. We never had time to listen to everything. So, typically, we’d sit around and listen to a few seconds of each track on a record to determine whether it fit the sound of the station. This would be referred to as doing a needle drop on the album. Similarly, here’s a hack that allows iTunes to breeze through a playlist of tracks, playing just a few seconds from each track.
The Code
This stay-open applet gets a number from the user to be used as
the number of seconds between calls to an idle
handler that executes a next track
command, thus playing each track
in the selected playlist for the specified number of seconds:
global needle_drop_interval
on run
-- get number of seconds
set needle_drop_interval to get_a_number("")
-- play first song in the playlist
tell application "iTunes"
play view of front window
end tell
return needle_drop_interval
end run
-- idle routine is called
on idle
tell application "iTunes" to next track
return needle_drop_interval
end idle
-- handler to get a number from user
to get_a_number(addenda)
set myNumber to text returned of (display dialog "" & ¬ addenda & "Play each track for how many seconds?" ...
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