A Yuletide Apocalypse

Update: I now use Synergy Advance’s builtin functions to accomplish this. Quicksilver is getting slow and bogged down enough already without having to deal with this iTunes crap. (http://wincent.com/a/products/synergy-advance/) Highly recommended.

Here’s a quick tip to alter the built-in Quicksilver iTunes triggers to increase a track’s rating by 1/2 rather than 1 star.
What I do is give the triggers (which are really just applescripts) hotkeys that I can hit whenever a song comes on I want to rate (I already have 1-5 stars mapped to cmd-opt-shift-1 through cmd-opt-shift-5, with 0 mapped to cmd-opt-shift-`)
So now you want to map the increase/decrease rating scripts to something you’ll remember, I’ll use cmd-opt-shift -(minus) and cmd-opt-shift-=
Now for the fun part… goto the following directory (shortcut: press cmd-shift-g then copy and paste the path below)
~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns/iTunes Module.qsplugin/Contents/Resources/Scripts/
If you get to the Plugins folder but are stuck… right click on iTunes Module.qsplugin and select Show Package Contents

Now double click Decrease Rating.scpt and Increase Rating.scpt–they should open in Script Editor and look like this:

tell application “System Events” to if (application processes whose name is “iTunes”) is not {} then ¬
tell application “iTunes” to if rating of current track is greater than 0 then set rating of current track to (rating of current track) - 20

Now the only modification is to change the number “20” to “10”. The iTunes rating system is actually 1-100, so you could rate things even finer than 1/2 star, but it won’t show up in iTunes (half stars are displayed, but apparently they aren’t recognized by the rating-weighted shuffle modes… still useful though.)

So then it looks like this:

tell application “System Events” to if (application processes whose name is “iTunes”) is not {} then ¬
tell application “iTunes” to if rating of current track is greater than 0 then set rating of current track to (rating of current track) - 10

Done!
Huzzah…

So the way I’d use this is to first rate using a whole number, 1-5, then add or subtract a 1/2 as I saw fit. So if I was listening to a song and I decided it was a 3.5, I’d hit the command for 3-stars, then increase by 1/2.

Things for the future:
Would be cool if there was some way for the rating to show up onscreen with a quicksilver-like bezel that showed you what the rating is/what it becomes.

Technorati Tags: Applescript, iTunes, OSX, Quicksilver, Tips