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Bug #1466: Rate as * hotkeys inoperable when listening to Genius Mixes

Kind bug
Product Synergy
When Created , updated
Status closed
Reporter anonymous
Tags no tags

Description

When playing any of the Genius Mixes in iTunes 9, the floater correctly displays the song information and rating, however the "Rate as *****" hotkeys do not function. The hotkeys work correctly when the songs are played from a normal playlist or from the library.

Comments

  1. Greg Hurrell

    Thanks for the report. I'm just going to see now if I can reproduce it.

  2. Greg Hurrell

    Ok, I can reproduce the flaw, and it looks like it is definitely a bug in iTunes itself.

    Synergy doesn't make any distinction between songs playing from the library, playlists, or a Genius Mix. If you ask it to set the rating to 4 stars, for example, it uses AppleScript/Apple Events to ask iTunes to set the rating, and then it's up to iTunes to actually set it.

    You can test this out yourself by opening the Script Editor:

    • it's /Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app on systems prior to Snow Leopard
    • it's /Applications/Utilities/AppleScript Editor.app on Snow Leopard

    And paste in and execute a test script like this one:

    tell application "iTunes" to set rating of current track to 80

    That would set the rating to 4 stars. Change the value for other star ratings; 0 for no stars, 20 for 1 star, 40 for 2 stars etc.

    You can see that this works normally, but when running from a Genius Mix iTunes just ignores it.

    So this is either a bug in iTunes, or perhaps they even designed it to work that way intentionally (ie. they consider that you are not actually listening to "a track" but rather "a mix" and you therefore can't actually rate it). Personally I'd argue that it's a bug.

    But either way not much Synergy can do to work around the issue.

  3. Greg Hurrell

    Status changed:

    • From: new
    • To: closed
  4. anonymous

    Actually, more than a bug, I think it's a malfunction.

    Other softwares (at least mine) allow to rate track played from Genius : instead of telling "set rating of current track to 80", you should tell iTunes to rate not current track, but track with particular ID (first, you need to get ID of current track). This is a bit more complex, but this is at least a workaround.

  5. Greg Hurrell

    Not sure what the distinction between "bug" and "malfunction" you're making is.

    If you play a Genius Mix, and execute:

    tell application "iTunes" to get current track

    iTunes will return:

    file track id 2644 of user playlist id 2641 of source id 45 of application "iTunes"

    So it clearly knows what the "current track" is in the context of a Genius Mix. If it fails to obey the example script I pasted originally (the tell application "iTunes" to set rating of current track to 80) then that sounds like a bug to me.

    But as you suggest, explicitly specifying the ID might be a viable workaround for the bug in iTunes.

    I will see what I can do. But I also suggest you file a bug with Apple so that they can fix the flaw in iTunes. I prefer not to clutter up the codebase with workarounds for Apple bugs unless it's absolutely necessary.

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