abshinn / SpotifyControl

Control Spotify through the OS X Terminal, also over ssh

SpotifyControl.scpt - Control Spotify in OS X Terminal

This is a AppleScript for controlling Spotify through Terminal.app.

The scenario for which it was originally designed is controlling Spotify, which is playing on a Mac, via ssh, while working on a Linux computer on the other side of the room.

Currently supported functions are: play/pause, next/previous track, jumping in time, toggling shuffle/repeat and changing volume. This pretty much covers everything the AppleScript hooks of Spotify allow.

Tested to work on OS X Lion and Mountain Lion and Spotify 0.8.4. No guarantees.

You may use, adapt, modify etc. any way you want.

Adaptation notes

Some small changes:

• added quit
• shortend spotify to spot
• added short-hand for volume N => vol N

Installation

I am assuming that if you need to control Spotify through the terminal you know enough about terminal usage.

The simplest way to install the script is just to just download the script file from the GitHub page and add the line alias spot="osascript /path/to/SpotifyControl.scrpt" in your .bash_profile.

If you have git, even simpler will be to clone this repository with git clone git://github.com/abshinn/SpotifyControl.git and then edit .bash_profile as above. This will also make it easy to keep up to date with possible updates to the script.

Usage

• To start Spotify playback, type spot start or spot play. If you do this locally and Spotify is not running, it will start. Remotely, Spotify will not start properly. Optionally, pass a Spotify URI as a second argument.
• To pause Spotify playback, type spot stop or spot pause.
• To toggle playback, type spot play/pause.
• To go to the next track, type spot next.
• To go to the previous track, type spot previous or spot prev.
• To print information about the currently playing track, type spot info
• To jump to a particular time in the track, type spot jump N, where N is the track position in seconds.
• To fast forward, type spot forward N where N is the number of seconds to jump ahead.
• To rewind, type spot rewind N where N is the number of seconds to jump backwards.
• To change volume, type spot volume N or spot vol N where N is a number between 0 and 100.
• To toggle shuffle, type spot shuffle.
• To toggle repeat, type spot repeat.
• To show a list of these commands, just type spot.

Over SSH

To enable the SSH server on OS X, go to Sharing in the System Preferences and enable Remote Login. The Sharing screen will also then tell you the command to use to connect to your Mac in the local network.