Big Bad Code

If you have your computer hooked up to your bedroom stereo like I do then you might find this script useful. It’s a quick easy way to make iTunes your alarm clock (but without having to listen to the crap on the radio).

Here’s what it looks like:

To use it you simply run the script and type
wake yourPlaylistName 7:30

Then at 7:30AM iTunes will fire up and start your playlist for you.
An extra nice feature is a slow ramp up of the iTunes volume. I start playing with the volume at 0 and ramp it up to 100 over about 1 minute.

You use iTunes for its strengths, browsing your music, playing your music, setting up playlists etc, and you use my script for what its good at. Playing a specific playlist at a certain time.

You can download the script from here

If you have no idea what Python is you will need to install a python interpreter as well.
You can get that from here.
Just download it and install it saying yes to all the defaults. Once its installed you can just click Wakeup_With_iTunes.py and it will start right up.

Notes:

• Your playlist name can’t have any spaces in it.
• Time is entered in 24hr format I.E. 6:30PM would be entered as 18:30
• For now this is Windows only as it relies on COM scripting, which Macs don’t have. Also I don’t have a Mac to develop with, so if anyone really needs this for a Mac just send me a Mac Mini and Ill have your wake up script turned around in a jiff

Any questions or testimonials please leave em in the comments.

With thanks to James Thiele for his console stub code, and all the other python people who are making their code available.