Control Pulsar with Alfred
Wherein you:
- Are a Sirius subscriber, and
- Listen to Sirius on your Mac via Rogue Amoeba’s awesome Pulsar application, and
- Heart the hell out of the productivity provided by Alfred, and
- Have the Alfred Powerpack installed, then
You might be wishing you could use Alfred to control Pulsar so you didn’t have to activate the app every time you wanted to pause a great song by Starland Vocal Band. I was too. Eventually, I decided to do something about it.
Pulsar’s script API isn’t very extensive, but it does cover pause/play as well as a few other useful bits. The Pulsar extension supports:
xm playxm pausexm show(display the channel, artist, track and album now being played)xm next(changes the channel to the next Favorite channel)xm prev(changes the channel to the previous Favorite channel)
I chose the xm keyword because it’s short and reasonably descriptive since I’m playing a Sirius_XM_ channel, but that’s easy to change once the extension is installed. If you have Growl installed, the xm show command will display a Growl notification. If not, it will degrade to an ugly, but functional alert dialog.
Hint: Any command other than play, pause, next and prev will behave as show. Give it a try.
