James Badger's Personal Site » Cocoa

Play Sound (Universal)

James Badger — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:40:37 +0000

I received some requests to update the Play Sound Automator action to work with newer Macs, so I went and posted the source to Github. Upon restoring the source code from a backup, it was quite a surprise finding out that it was already a git repo… five years ago!

I also rebuilt a binary version of the action, which is incredibly simple to install: just double-click. It is also compatible with both PPC and Intel Macs, I had success running it with 10.4 on a G4 Mac Mini. You can download from Github or download from my site.

Additionally, it is now open source so if you see any changes (the code has been changed in over five years), fork it on Github and let me know!

Special Thanks:
StackOverflow — Create Universal Automator Action
Google Fodder — 64-bit Automator and Snow Leopard

Play Sound

James Badger — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 06:47:46 +0000

Notice: Newer version available

There is a newer version of the action available, with support for Intel and PPC Macs. Download.

You could use the version on this page, but it is only compatible with PPC Macs. Don’t even try to run it on a new Mac. Seriously, it doesn’t work.

Play Sound

Version 1.0 – Nov 15/05

Play Sound is an Automator action that simply tries to play any sound file passed into it. Learn more about Automator

It will accept a list of files, and only play audio files of types AIFF, M4A, MPEG (MP3), WAV, and ULAW. I may add support for more formats in the future, I wasn’t sure how it would handle trying to play a non-audio file.

Download

Download Disk Image – 208KiB
MD5 (playsound10.dmg) = 39fe792f5617cdacd6577489ca4f8354

Requirements

A Macintosh
Mac OS X version 10.4.0 or greater

Cost

Free!

Installation

Open the disk image after downloading, and open the Installer program. You will be guided through installation. If you prefer to install the file manually, you can drag the file to the location of your choice.

Getting Started

After installing the file, open the Automator application in your Applications folder. Try to recreate the workflow below, substituting in a folder of sounds you have on your Mac. If you don’t know what to choose, try /System/Library/Sounds

You can find the Play Sound action under the System category. If the workflow is correct, it should try to play every sound file in the directory, one after another. You can halt the program at any time by pressing Stop, which will interrupt the currently playing sound.

Known Issues

Limited to audio files of types AIFF, M4A, MPEG (MP3), WAV, and ULAW.

Version History

Play Sound Action
November 15th, 2005
- First Release

Widgets & Actions

James Badger — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:42:18 +0000

I have the “Play Sound” Action ready, but actions don’t have the same type of ease of installation that is found with screen savers, where double-clicking it will install it (either in the user’s folder, or in the main library folder). So I wrote a small installation program to handle this, hopefully it is lightweight enough to make it easy for any user, and look nice too. I went for Applescript Studio for the installer (I thought it would be faster to develop), but it makes me appreciate the advantages of Cocoa more, I think.

Also developing a widget. Or two. Both powered by PHP, because a) it’s installed on Tiger, and b) it’s really easy to write with. Maybe I’ll convert them to Cocoa or something later (Cocoa is fast!), but I really want to get some feedback on them.

Working with Automator