“scroll” through your music

If you like me listen to a lot of new music every day, you also know that there’s a lot of crap out there too. To find the pearls faster it might be useful to use fast forward to “scroll” through a track or podcast. This is now possible with Quicksilver and a little help of AppleScript. If you follow the instructions below you’ll have a trigger for fast forward, and if you want, also for rewind. You can do this even without knowledge of AppleScript (to be honest, I’m clueless too ). Let’s go:

1. open Script Editor (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app)
2. paste the following code into the editing window of Script Editor, this is going to be the script which will later be triggered from Quicksilver:

   property secondsToRewind : 5
property iTunes_is_paused : false
on run
rewindiTunes()
set iTunes_is_paused to false
end run
on reopen
if iTunes_is_paused then
rewindiTunes()
set iTunes_is_paused to false
else
rewindiTunes()
end if
end reopen
to rewindiTunes()
tell application "iTunes"
if player state is not stopped then
set pos to player position
if (pos is greater than secondsToRewind) and ¬
(pos is less than finish of current track) then
set player position to pos + secondsToRewind
play
end if
end if
end tell
end rewindiTunes

3. hit compile and save this script somewhere with a name like qs_fast_forward.scpt (I suggest ~/Music/)
4. the only thing left to do now is to set this script up as a trigger. You can do this the normal way via the Quicksilver preferences, but because you’re a kool kid you’re gonna do this the direct way with Quicksilver, follow me . Invoke Quicksilver, locate the script saved in step three, TAB to the right pane and select “Run” (if it’s not already selected), hit CTRL-Enter, now the right pane should have changed it’s icon to the Quicksilver application icon, that means that the complete action “run qs_fast_forward.scpt” is now in the left pane and you can do something with this specific action. In our case we want to set up a trigger for it, so in the right pane select “Add Trigger”. W00sh, the Trigger preferences are popping up with the trigger already set up. Now it’s up to you to bind a key to our new and shiny trigger. I use CTRL-ALT-COMMAND-right for this.

I hope you could follow the instructions (otherwise, please ask in the comments), it’s always hard to describe those kind of things, it’s much easier than it reads. Now if you want the same thing for rewind, just change pos + in the script to pos -, save it under another name and trigger it accordingly. You could also alter the amount of seconds to be skipped when doing fast forward/backward, just change the number in the first line from 5 (seconds) to something else.

As said before I’m no AppleScript master either, so this trick is originally from Unburst. Thanks for this one Unburst.