Dan Swain, dan.t.swain@gmail.com, 2/16/2012

RTunes is a thin wrapper for using rbosa's Ruby/Apple Event Manager bridge to control iTunes. I wrote it to facilitate adding keyboard shortcuts to various editors/IDEs.

• Mac OS X*
• The 'rbosa' gem - sudo gem install rbosa
• Written and run with Ruby 1.8.7. It should work on newer versions.

* I'm not sure what versions of OS X will or won't work. I run it on Snow Leopard and don't see why it wouldn't work on any version of OS X that has Ruby and Gem installed, but you never know. Let me know if you have any success or failure :)

Either make rTunes.rb executable (chmod +x rTunes.rb) or run it with Ruby (ruby rTunes.rb).

rTunes Usage: 
    -n, --skip                       Skip to the next track
    -r, --previous                   Previous track
    -p, --pause                      Play/pause
    -d, --volume-down [AMT]          Volume down by AMT (default 10)
    -u, --volume-up [AMT]            Volume up by AMT (default 10)
    -h, --help                       Display help

For the most part, rTunes relies on method_missing to delegate function calls to an instance of OSA.app('iTunes'). You can generate the documentation for that by running rdoc-osa --name iTunes - or look here.

The only two added functions at this point are RTunes::volume_change and RTunes::did_something?.

• RTunes::volume_change amt changes the volume by amt. The volume is a number from 0 to 100, so an amt of 10 is a 10% change.
• RTunes::did_something? returns true if you've actually used the object instance to do anything with iTunes. (It's used in the script, and should really be refactored out of the RTunes class.)

A simple example:

rtunes = RTunes.new
# skip to the next song
rtunes.next_track
# decrease the volume 10%
rtunes.volume_change -10