Trying to find music!

[dogen]

Hello everyone. I've been using Alfred v2 with the power pack for about a month now and absolutely love it. There is just feature that I can't seem to figure out that is killing me--finding and playing music!

 

I love that I can create workflows by just typing what seems logical, without having to memorise all sorts of complicated hotkeys--the whole thing I love is that everything starts from the launch alfred hotkey, and I can just go logically from there. It kills me, however, that I can't search for music without opening the mini player (causing me to press enter once). In the iTunes Keywords set there are options for Play/Pause, Next track, Previous Track, Random Album, etc. The great thing about these is that they can be accessed without having to open up the mini player; you can enable these iTunes mini player commands to work directly from the normal alfred bar. There isn't, however, a function to search for music in the Keywords page--am I missing something? I have tried several different workflows I've come across the internet for searching and playing for music without opening the iTunes player, but they all have problems (results load slowly, switches to desktop after pressing enter while using full screen applications, etc.).

 

Is there a native way to find music without opening the mini player? Also, could I make it so that Alfred automatically brings up the mini player just by typing "music" (no enter)?

 

Thanks you very much in advance!!

[jdfwarrior]

Hello everyone. I've been using Alfred v2 with the power pack for about a month now and absolutely love it. There is just feature that I can't seem to figure out that is killing me--finding and playing music!

 

I love that I can create workflows by just typing what seems logical, without having to memorise all sorts of complicated hotkeys--the whole thing I love is that everything starts from the launch alfred hotkey, and I can just go logically from there. It kills me, however, that I can't search for music without opening the mini player (causing me to press enter once). In the iTunes Keywords set there are options for Play/Pause, Next track, Previous Track, Random Album, etc. The great thing about these is that they can be accessed without having to open up the mini player; you can enable these iTunes mini player commands to work directly from the normal alfred bar. There isn't, however, a function to search for music in the Keywords page--am I missing something? I have tried several different workflows I've come across the internet for searching and playing for music without opening the iTunes player, but they all have problems (results load slowly, switches to desktop after pressing enter while using full screen applications, etc.).

 

Is there a native way to find music without opening the mini player? Also, could I make it so that Alfred automatically brings up the mini player just by typing "music" (no enter)?

 

Thanks you very much in advance!!

 

You could create a file filter that would only show mp3s (or whatever format you use) within a folder but that wouldn't show actual metadata (the id3 tags and such) in results, it would show the file name and path. You could make workflow that would allow you to show id3 info in the results but that, as you mentioned before, sometimes tends to be slower because it isn't using the native access to Spotlight's metadata server to do the searches. The workflow itself is performing the search. That workflow COULD use mdfind to search and may speed things up some, but it still wouldn't be as fast as Alfred could do it and you also wouldn't get the album art and such. The mini player is the best solution. You could change the way you access the mini player to make it a little easier. For example.. if you use the Cmd+Space hotkey to access Alfred, you could use something like Opt+Space for the mini player. Or, another option would be using F6 since it resides just to the left of the other media keys.  

[Vero]

Hello everyone. I've been using Alfred v2 with the power pack for about a month now and absolutely love it. There is just feature that I can't seem to figure out that is killing me--finding and playing music!

 

Is there a native way to find music without opening the mini player? Also, could I make it so that Alfred automatically brings up the mini player just by typing "music" (no enter)?

 

Have you tried the "Find and play music" workflow that's included as an example?

 

Go to the Workflows tab, and under the + at the bottom of the sidebar, you'll find it in Examples.

 

This will allow you to search based on the file name (usually the song title) of music files (mp3, mp4 and m4a). It's limited in that it uses the file name, and everyone seems to name their music files differently. 

 

Going back to the Mini Player, did you know that you can launch it with its own hotkey? By default, this is cmd + ctrl + enter, and you can start typing the name of an artist, album or song to start playing from there, so it's quite an efficient way to pick music!

 

Hope this helps,

Vero

[Manorts]

Hello everyone. I've been using Alfred v2 with the power pack for about a month now and absolutely love it. There is just feature that I can't seem to figure out that is killing me--finding and playing music!

 

 

Is there a native way to find music without opening the mini player? Also, could I make it so that Alfred automatically brings up the mini player just by typing "music" (no enter)?

 

 

 

Hi there,

 

I am new here and just learning.

Have been playing with Alfred and Script Editor for some time and was looking for a video player.

I found a real simple solution using VLC. The beauty is that it plays music as well which may suit your purpose.

The script is quite simple an of course and works with anything VLC can play.

 

set video to choose file

    tell application "vlc"

    open video

end tell

 

It may be of some use to you or others