SizzlingKeys Comprehensive Replacement

Keyboard Maestro is awesome. I have been worrying about a program I use quite a bit to control iTunes for some time. It's a really super program, but I think it's days are reaching an end, especially after a chat with its developer. Due to various problems, I thought maybe it's time to figure out how to replace it comprehensively with Keyboard Maestro.

The app is SizzlingKeys. Can we prepare a guide here that would walk someone through reproducing all of the functionality provided by this app? Most of the functions are simple, but there are a few that are very tricky. These tricky functions include "Almost Mute", and "Skip Backward/Forward" by X seconds. There's also a "floater" that shows the current playing song and rating, but I doubt that Keyboard Maestro can do that.

Let me share some screenshots of the SizzlingKeys functionality:

As you certainly have seen, KM comes with a whole set of iTunes-specific actions:

I guess this covers 80 or 90% of your previous commands.

Here are two examples:

Many of your non-iTunes commands (sleep, system volume, etc.) are also covered by pre-made actions:

Other things may be accomplished with AppleScript macros.

I propose you build the macros as much as you can, and then let us know which ones are posing problems.

And, I think, when a program ceases to exist, this does not necessarily mean that you have to clone the old functions to the new program 1:1. Such a change is always a chance to rethink the UI concept: maybe some things are superfluous, some things should be changed, some things added.

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No more Sizzling Keys??? Nooo! Say it ain’t so!

Seriously, while I’m not afraid of replicating most playback functions, not only is the floater indispensable, but no way I can live without Find and Play Song and Find and Play Playlist.

I use these many, many times each and every day. Being forced to drop into the gawdawful monstrosity that is iTunes for that will be the end of me.

iTunes Search features have become beyond maddening; I want to kill Bono for convincing Steve that iTunes — a database program — should not look or work “like a spreadsheet.”

I had another method of skipping x seconds, and also fast playback/rewind; I’ll try to replicate and post.

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I know Frederico. I’m right there with you. I was really super sad to hear it from the horse’s mouth as well. We’ve got to figure out our options and get some of these tricky things figured out into a nice comprehensive guide here. Perhaps we need to program some AppleScripts as well to make the situation more palatable…

I see no way to replace the find song/playlist feature with AppleScript, let alone KM. It’s going to take, at a minimum, an awesome shell script to scan the iTunes library file (and may have to use the xml not itl), and a better graphical display than km offers. Plus I don’t see how to do live updating or fuzzy search; there’s no easy way to deal with typos, etc.

That feature will require native programming.

What feature do you need, that is not already in KM? I’m pretty decent with AppleScript and some shell, and don’t mind a project, if it’s beyond you.

This isn’t a KM-specific solution, but have any of you looked at Alfred’s iTunes mini player? https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/itunes/#mini-player

It has playback controls, ratings, volume adjustments, and a prominent search feature that lets you find songs, playlists, etc just by, well, searching (I don’t know how fuzzy it is, but I can vouch that it finds songs with words in their titles that aren’t the first word. I never used SizzlingKeys myself, but I did rely on a similar app called CoverSutra for a long time, and Alfred’s mini player and a couple of KM macros filling in the gaps have pretty satisfactorily replaced it for me.

A few versions back @peternlewis added many SizzlingKeys-like features into Keyboard Maestro. As @Tom showed up above, much of what SizzlingKeys does is available. Perhaps less obvious, though, is how current track info can be displayed from anywhere on the Mac with KM:

And in case anyone doesn't already know, Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes is probably the most comprehensive iTunes and AppleScript resource available.

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