A Digital Notepad

I asked myself the question today, is there a way to rate a song in iTunes with a keyboard shortcut? Yes, there is.

Update: Here’s a couple links that may help. One is X-Tunes, an app that might replace what your looking at this script for.

http://www.pol-online.net/x-tunes
http://proxi.griffintechnology.com/blog/2007/09/06/trigger-chains-with-applescript/

I found a walk-through on how to do this at www.macgeekery.com
describing how, but it’s a walk through that’s better suited for those looking to learn how to write more scripts.

If you just want to get it working, here’s how…

1. Open the System Preferences, open Keyboard & Mouse, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts
2. Create 5 new short cuts, name them Rate as 1, Rate as 2, … Rate as 5. (Remember how they are named exactly) Make each of the 5 short cuts react to the short cut you want to, e.g. I set Rate as 1 to apple-alt-1, rate as 2 to apple-alt-2 and so on
3. Create the folders if they don’t exist, but you’ll be saving 5 files in /Library/iTunes/Scripts (or ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts in you only want the short cuts in one users iTunes)
4. Open the application Script Editor (Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor) and enter the following into the script window…
   
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with theTrack in (get selection)
set the rating of theTrack to 20
end repeat
end tell

5. Save As “Rate as 1″ exactly as the short cut that was created is named, in the folder you created in the last step. (File format should be script)
6. Do this four more times, but before you save change the 20 from above to match the following (20 = 1 star)(40 = 2 star)(60 = 3 star)(80 = 4 star)(100 = 5 star)
7. Almost set, now you just need to restart something called SystemUIServer. Open the Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor), then find the Process Name (SystemUIServer) and Quit Process. Like the Finder, if you Force Quit it will just re-start almost instantly. (Alternatively, you could reboot the computer)

You should be all set now, in iTunes you can rate the selected song with the keyboard short cuts. If you don’t like apple-option-number you can use whatever you want, just tweak the keyboard short cuts menu.