foobar2000 for Mac OS X [moderation—404, outdated, etc.; see post 119]
Reply #79 – 2010-04-30 10:59:10
is there any way to get shortcuts working? i understand that some people are using a virtual computer to run foobar on mac, as stated on the first page of this thread. do global keyboard work with that? would the apple remote work? the thing is, i am planning on buying a new computer, either mac or pc. and i'm basing my decision almost purely on the foobar-factor. pretty ridiculous but i just love foobar's efficiency. If you don't care, I'd get a PC. I get a lot out of my Mac, but can't do without foobar, so I'm running XP in VMware Fusion purely in order to use foobar Although it also means I always have a PC for testing things, plugging in NTFS drives etc. So. I get the global shortcuts working through a combination of stupid things. I still haven't got the "skip forward/backward 10 secs" feature working but don't really mind. I use foo_httpcontrol, which is way cool anyway. With it setup, you can request a URL like:http://192.168.56.138:8888/default/?cmd=StartNext¶m1= where the IP address is the IP address of the virtual machine (this may work fine in Wine - maybe even with localhost? Not sure) This will skip to the next track, obvs. With that information, I write an AppleScript that requests that URL:do shell script "/opt/local/bin/wget -qO /dev/null http://192.168.56.138:8888/default/?cmd=StartNext¶m1=" using wget, sending the output to /dev/null - because we don't actually want to view the page, just get the command sent to foobar. So how do you trigger these AppleScripts? Well, after a few different attempts at things, I now use a program called Spark to assign shortcuts to AppleScripts - it's more powerful than that, but you can write the AppleScripts in its own config, which is nice - it's not looking them up from a file or running an app or anything. Even better, I then use the awesomest program for MacBooks, BetterTouchTool , to trigger those shortcuts with custom multi-touch trackpad gestures. Actually I really only use the trackpad gestures in foobar though. So... it's convoluted but it works. There may be a better (more direct) option than foo_httpcontrol, which requires wget to access the URLs. And for some reason the command-line syntax for skipping 10 secs forward/back hasn't worked for me with foo_httpcontrol, so I'd be interested in sorting that out too sometime. Drawbacks: sometimes the AppleScripts don't trigger immediately, so it's not a perfect solution. Mostly works fine though - OSX simply doesn't have a built-in solution for global hotkeys; one of the many bloody-mindedly stupid things that Apple and Macfans cling to ("why would you want to do that?") Oh, and, no reason the Apple Remote wouldn't work if it works in Windows...