I wanted to use the Apple Remote to control Spotify like you can control Front Row or iTunes. I barely use the the remote to anything else but to control the volume so I wanted a change. I started to google and I found theMacBox. They have built an application for just this purpose. But unfortunately they’ve stopped develop it in 2010 and it does not work any more. I sent them an email to make it an open source project but I haven’t got any reply yet. I aslo found SpotifyIrRemote but it doesn’t work with Leopard so I couldn’t test it.
What I did was to build my own application. A lot of googling later I found that the solution was pretty simple. I installed a program called Mira that let me change the behaviour of the Mac Remote. Then I wrote 3 AppleScripts to run on some key press. The scripts is very straight forward.
spotify-next.scpt:
tell application ”Spotify” to next track
spotify-prev.scpt:
tell application ”Spotify” to previous track
spotify-play.scpt:
tell application ”Spotify”
set ps to player state
if ps is playing then pause
if ps is not playing then play
end tell
So to get it to work:
- Save these scripts into 3 AppleScript using AppleScript-editor.
- Download and install Mira. (you may want to use this download link)
- Go to system preferences an click on Mira.
- Click at a button, choose ”open object” and the ”AppleScript”.
- Choose one of the AppleScripts you created in step 1.
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