Seitunes, an iTunes command-line interface

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)