iTunes - HQPlayer front-end re-visited

[Bob Stern]

Congratulations on learning AppleScript Objective-C!  That's something I look forward to tackling.  Did you rely primarily on Shane Stanley's book?  Do you recommend any other Obj-C books or tutorials?

 

I've been reading Apple's iBook "App Development with Swift".  I recommend it if you want to learn to use NSURLSession.

[Bob Stern]

Geoff, if you included Mute commands to avoid popping sounds in certain situations, like changing sample rates, I suggest you report the pops to Jussi as a bug.  HQP should mute the output automatically when necessary to eliminate pops.  That would eliminate the need for you to include mute commands in your program.

 

I'm unaware of any mute command in the desktop GUI.  (I have no experience with the touchscreen GUI.)  If mute normally is not used, it's not surprising that the conditions for un-mute are undefined.

[Bob Stern]

28 minutes ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said:

Anyone familiar with using iTunes scripts from Doug’s scripts site (as a good example) will be familiar with the process of placing scripts in this ~Library/iTunes/Scripts folder.

 

Doing so makes a script available in the Scripts menu within iTunes. You can place iTunes-HQPlayer Server in this folder to make it accesible from this scripts menu within iTunes if you wish; but you can run it from anywhere.

 

I’ve obviously made the mistake of assuming this sort of stuff would be obvious to Computer Audiophiles on Mac. Clearly it isn’t!

 

You might consider providing an installer script that checks whether this folder exists and creates it if necessary.

[Bob Stern]

2 hours ago, Miska said:

Whenever you use HQPlayer, make sure your DAC is not set as a default audio output device in Audio & MIDI Settings.

 

There probably is a sonic benefit to specifying a default device other than the DAC in Audio MIDI Setup, but this setting should not prevent HQP or Geoff's script from working.  HQP does not attempt to acquire "exclusive access" for the DAC (i.e., HQP does not use "hog mode"), so HQP should be oblivious to whether OS X is mixing HQP's output with the default system audio.

 

I don’t use Roon, so I don’t know whether it has additional requirements.

[Bob Stern]

42 minutes ago, Jamesroy said:

I knew you'd say that. I've been on a mack for 50 years and they do have little glitches. Like in the sys pref's where the little speaker icon is sometimes it won't go or stick on your audio app of choice. I know with A+ I have to at time select it many times before it decides to stay there where I want it.

 

In Sound Prefs and Audio MIDI Setup, you select audio devices, not apps.

 

What audio device are you trying to select in Sound Prefs?  Regardless of whether your music player is HQP, A+, BitPerfect, or Pure Music, the Audio MIDI Setup configuration shown above by Miska should eliminate the "sticking" problem.

 

On the other hand, if you inadvertently assign default system audio or alert audio to your DAC in Sound Prefs, and if you enable Exclusive Access (Hog) Mode in A+, A+ will override this and reassign the system audio to some device other than the DAC.  That's a good thing.

[Bob Stern]

If you are running Geoff's app on a different computer from HQP, you need a copy of HQP in the Applications folder of both computers.  Only the copy of HQP on the computer connected to your DAC has to be registered; it does not matter whether the copy on the other computer is registered.

[Bob Stern]

@DancingSea Since you are dragging files from iTunes to HQP, I assume you are not playing DSD files that way.  If Geoff's app doesn’t meet your needs, I have an AppleScript I use to append to HQP's queue a selection of files from the iTunes window.  My script is less ambitious than Geoff's app: I haven't attempted to include DSD, and I don’t create a RAM disk.

 

OTOH, I suggest trying Swinsian as a replacement for iTunes as a database manager.  I plan to try switching from iTunes to Swinsian when I get some free time in a couple of months.  My beef with iTunes is its flakiness:  It often says it cannot find a music file, and sometimes it discards my edits to metadata.

 

http://swinsian.com

[Bob Stern]

34 minutes ago, Geoffrey Armstrong said:

Apple appears to be letting Applescript decline and is no longer encouraging it in the way it did in the past. The real question is whether Apple still believes in the concept of providing APIs to its core apps. These have allowed developers to produce plug-ins to iTunes; etc. which is what my app is.

I would much prefer to be able to write such plug-ins in Swift in the future. I think this would make development far easier for such aspects as writing the GUI parts, for example.

 

To run AppleScript commands from a Swift app, Scripting Bridge remains essentially unchanged since 2008, except for the addition of a Swift counterpart of the original ObjC framework:

 

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ScriptingBridgeConcepts/Introduction/Introduction.html

 

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/scriptingbridge

[Bob Stern]

16 hours ago, DancingSea said:

Wherefore art thou

 

"Wherefore" means "why", not "where".