lixo.org

Inspired by Nat Pryce’s recent scrapheap challenge idea for a Name That Tune style game, and given I’ve been having so much fun with the Ruby OSA lately, I decided to implement my own solution using it to drive iTunes and I had a lot of fun in the process.

I started by grabbing a reference to iTunes:

%w(rubygems rbosa).each {|lib| require lib }

itunes = OSA.app(”iTunes”)

And then playing about with it until I found the right properties to look at and methods to call. As the game requires a constant stream of random tracks, I thought using the Party Shuffle feature of iTunes to would fit just right. The Party Shuffle is a special playlist that sits inside your library:

library = itunes.sources.find {|s| s.kind == OSA::ITunes::ESRC::LIBRARY }
party_shuffle = library.playlists.find {|p| p.special_kind == OSA::ITunes::ESPK::PARTY_SHUFFLE }

With that party_shuffle (an OSA::ITunes::Playlist object) at hand, it’s pretty easy to do the rest: playing, changing tracks and figuring out how to score each guess.

If you can grab the complete solution and make it into a nice little dashboard widget, I’ll be forever in debt!


BONUS UPDATE: I just finished refactoring a couple of things (namely, moving the monkey patching of OSA::ITunes away - it’s now in itunes.rb) and, in the process of doing so, Tune Fight was born!