Quicksilver iTunes Kung Fu
Quicksilver has been getting a lot of press lately on various sites, and has been a darling of the Mac community for a while now–and rightfully so. For those who don’t know Quicksilver is more than a search application or application launcher (a la LaunchBar). It is an interface for quickly locating and manipulating files or other data on your Mac, saving you the time and effort of digging through folders and menus to do what you want. For example copying a file with just the finder would take me about 20 seconds especially if I had to dig through several layers of folders to get to the source and/or destination. With Quicksilver, I can cut that time in half. Quicksilver has a universe of functionality, but what I want to spotlight here it it’s integration with iTunes. Quicksilver makes an excellent front end for your iTunes library for when you want to play a particular song or particular album without going all clickety click click through the iTunes application. You can also configure HotKeys or triggers within Quicksilver, so you can control iTunes (play, next track, ratings, etc) from anywhere. This is especially useful when you’re working in another application. Quicksilver will allow you to control iTunes without having to bring up iTunes and do whatever it is you wanted to do. I’ll focus on a simple task like playing a particular track from a particular artist just as a small sample of how Quicksilver can interface with iTunes. For this to work, you’ll need.
1. Quicksilver (duh)
2. The Quicksilver iTunes plugin which can be installed from inside the Quicksilver preferences.
Once you have the plugin, we can rock.
Say you’re in Safari, reading your favorite blog (like seanmcgrath.wordpress.com) and you want to listen to “Telephone Line” by Electric Light Orchestra.
Summon Quicksilver with Control-Spacebar (or ⌘-Spacebar) or whatever key combination you’ve selected to launch Quicksilver. Once it’s up, start typing “iTunes”. In most cases, “iT” should be enough.
Once iTunes is displayed, arrow right which should bring you into a menu containing iTunes contents. Look for the “Browse Artists” option
Then arrow right. You can scroll through the artists or start typing the name of the artist–in this case “Electric”
Once “Electric Light Orchestra” is highlighted, arrow right.
You’ll be presented with the album or albums.
Select the “All Albums” or the specific album we want and, say it with me, arrow right.
Now select the song either by typing the first few letters (if there are a lot of songs) or just select the song you want.
Hit tab, make sure “Play” is the command in the next window and hit enter.
Granted, since we knew the song we wanted we did not have to go through the whole artist thing. We could have done “Browse Tracks” and started typing the name of the song, but I wanted to show you that Quicksilver can be used to browse through your iTunes collection as well.
This is just the tip of a very large Iceberg, and only the smallest fraction of what Quicksilver is capable of. With triggers you can create a hot key combination for setting the rating of the currently playing song without leaving whatever application you’re in. Also keep in mind that Quicksilver has this level of integration of a host of other apps such as iPhoto.
