My home main computer is a MacBook Pro, on which I frequently play music with iTunes. However, I’m often on my laptop, without direct access to the MBP’s screen or keyboard/mouse to pause, change song, change volume, etc. I can connect to the MBP using VNC, but I was looking for something more lightweight.
I therefore decided to design a command-line interface for iTunes, that I would run via SSH. I called it Seitunes for reasons I can’t really remember right now, but there it is!
Seitunes is
– written in C and interfaces with iTunes through AppleScript
– designed for OS X – should be compatible with quite old versions actually, because it doesn’t rely on a lot of cutting edge features
– built upon the curses library
– very very small
– still under development
– Free software (GPLv3)
– available here
Features
> Display iTunes playing track and status
> Control iTunes playback (play/pause, volume, next song/previous song)
> If iTunes is stopped when Seitunes starts, it starts iTunes and starts a song from the Library.
To do
> Add more tests to better check iTunes state and not trigger Applescript errors
> Add info about playlists in order to be able to play a specific playlist instead of the whole library
> Add an option to toggle shuffle
> Implement the “quit iTunes” function and check that it doesn’t cause more Applescript problems
Known bugs
> An error message flickers when an Applescript error is triggered (often when iTunes quit while Seitunes is opened)