Improve iTunes navigation on Mac

Gary Marshall shows how you can use Apple’s powerful built-in automation tool to make it easier to get around.

“One of the brilliant things about Automator is that you can use it to add features that Apple hasn’t got round to.”

Automator must envy Siri. While Apple’s digital assistant hogs all the headlines, Automator just gets on with the job of automating things on your Mac and gets hardly any credit. It’s an incredibly powerful app, and it’s nowhere near as frightening as it looks.

Automator’s job is to take care of common tasks for you. It’s effectively a programming tool, but once you’ve done the prep work, it can generate the necessary script for you. All you need to do is show Automator what to do and it’ll record how to do it.

One of the brilliant things about Automator is that you can use it to add features that Apple hasn’t got round to yet. For example, in iTunes, you can navigate much of the interface from the keyboard — switching between kinds of media or moving the focus to the search bar, say — but there aren’t shortcuts for the buttons to switch between Library, For You, Browse, Radio and the iTunes Store. As you’ll discover, Automator can fix that, and lets us assign whatever keyboard shortcuts we want.

Automator is all about automation, and Macs are very wary of anything automated in case it’s malicious software. That means, if you’ve got a fairly untouched installation of macOS, Automator might be blocked from controlling your Mac. In that case, your Mac will tell you so when you try to run your Automator workflow, and you may have to give permission to Automator or iTunes in ‘System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy’.

ITUNES TRIGGERS

Let’s explain what we’re going to do in this tutorial. First of all, we’re going to record the action of clicking on one of iTunes’ buttons, then we’re going to turn that recording into the AppleScript for the new Service our keyboard shortcut will trigger. We’ll then edit that slightly and copy it for each button, giving us five in total. Then we’ll create our shortcuts.

Note that when we edit the AppleScript, we add a ‘return’ command: that’s to prevent error pop-ups if there are fewer than five buttons in the middle of iTunes’ navigation bar. We’ll make five shortcuts to match the number of sections in the Music category, but other kinds of media have fewer sections, and we don’t want pressing shortcut four or five to make our Mac angry.