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.

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 spotify="osascript /path/to/SpotifyControl.scpt" in your .profile.

If you have git, even simpler will be to clone this repository with git clone git://github.com/dronir/SpotifyControl.git and then edit .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 spotify start or spotify 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 spotify stop or spotify pause.
• To toggle playback, type spotify play/pause.
• To go to the next track, type spotify next.
• To go to the previous track, type spotify previous or spotify prev.
• To print information about the currently playing track, type spotify info
• To jump to a particular time in the track, type spotify jump N, where N is the track position in seconds.
• To fast forward, type spotify forward N where N is the number of seconds to jump ahead.
• To rewind, type spotify rewind N where N is the number of seconds to jump backwards.
• To change volume, type spotify volume N where N is a number between 0 and 100.
• To toggle shuffle, type spotify shuffle.
• To toggle repeat, type spotify repeat.
• To show a list of these commands, just type spotify.

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.