Nothing Wins the Justice

I have been asked previously how on earth I manage to listen to all of the podcasts that I download. The answer comes down to listen whilst driving, listen whilst walking, listen whilst gaming and listen whilst working on less interesting things.

That said, I do have a secret weapon for instances where I have managed to fall particularly behind. And that is applescript.

Applescript lets me tie together iTunes and Quicktime more closely and take advantage of the play rate aspect of Quicktime. Quicktime allows you to playback content at different speeds with automatic pitch correction. The trick is moving information correctly between the two apps, and updating the iTunes library with the requisite info.

Podcasts are typically still easily understandable at a rate of 1.25 to 1.35. I have slowly cranked up the speed on mine so I typically listen at 1.75, and occasionally 2.

You can grab my iTunes scripts here, I recommend using them with Quicksilver

The scripts consist of "Play Playlist until App" which will allow you to select any playlist in iTunes and play it at a rate you choose, it will automatically swap in and out between tracks, and let you play and pause quicktime without stopping. This will continue until the playlist finished or the "End Playing at 1.5.app" is executed.

The playpause itunes script is intended to be a universal playpause script. It prioritizes in the following order:

1. DVD Player 2. VLC 3. Quicktime 4. iTunes

I have tied it to a ctrl+alt+command+space shortcut in Quicksilver so whatever I am watching I can play/pause it with the same button combo.

The other script I want to talk about is a new one which I wrote to remove the problem I occasionally have, which is I want to play a game, but I don't know which game I want to play. It's entire purpose is to take a Games List.txt file on the desktop, give me a choice of categories in the file, then randomly pick a game from the category.

The quicksilver version will then say the name of the game and display on the screen, the non-quicksilver version will just show a dialog box.

I'm planning on using this for the next week do any gaming at home initiated by me. I'm intending on writing a couple of posts about doing this.

If you want to make your own list, the text file format is pretty simple, categories are started with "--" at the start of the category line, every other line is assumed to be part of the category until the next one is defined.

GrubLord: Good God, there's a whole science to this I never really thought of...

Have you considered listening to some Pimsleur language learning CDs?

Given the rate at which you consume audio, you could speak every language on Earth fluently by next year...

GrubLord: Incidentally, for the 'Play/Pause' script, what happens if you just use the Apple Remote's pause?

If that's not quite as cool, have you found a way to set the Apple Remote's play/pause button to run your script?

Ranneko: Hmm, not actually tried the apple remote in some time, not even sure I know where my remote is these days.

That said, if I am listening to things, typically the app does not have focus. So not sure what the remote would use with repsect to playing things.

GrubLord: Good God - I was just making my own random games list, and I hence took a look at yours.

You're playing all those games?!

GrubLord: ... what do you do when "Board Gaming" comes up? Call an emergency RanLAN?

Ranneko: Well Boardgaming appears on the multiplayer game list, which is partially intented for use at LANs, but also there is BrettspielWelt.

The games list has actually changed over the week though. I have finished 2 games! Unfortunately the same number of games have been added to the list...