So far, I’ve concentrated on using LaunchBar to access apps; open files; and carry out special functions, like browsing the Web and performing calculations. But, LaunchBar also has built-in categories and actions that help you control iTunes from the keyboard.
And, LaunchBar has a number of special indexing rules that let you access your iTunes library by artist, album, genre, playlist, and more. You can also control iTunes while playing music, using LaunchBar to pause, play, skip tracks, and change volume. And, you can even Search in the iTunes Store, right from the bar.
LaunchBar lets you browse your iTunes music library from top to bottom, inside and out. Start by invoking the bar, then type, say, IT, and find iTunes. Arrow right to see a list of categories (Figure 32).
You can browse to investigate any of these categories.
A Best Of list is a sort of smart playlist based on the star ratings that you’ve assigned in iTunes. LaunchBar creates these lists by artist, composer, and genre. The default setting uses a 4-star rating as a minimum, but you can change this, if you wish, in the Options pane of the iTunes indexing rule. (See Control the Index.) Think of Best Of lists as a way to access dozens, even hundreds, of smart playlists showing the highest-rated music by all the artists, composers, and genres in your music library. It would take days to create all these playlists in iTunes!
The other categories include the playlists in your iTunes library; all the artists, composers, and genres; and all the songs, as well as a couple of specific categories, such as Identically Named Albums and Identically Named Songs.
As usual, browsing and sub-searching are your friends. You can browse any category and select an item to start playing it. Or, type a few letters to home in on the item you’re looking for.
Each time you go down a level, LaunchBar may present more top-level categories. So, if you select a genre, you see, at the top of the results, Best Of Genre, if there are any adequately rated songs, then entries for playlists, albums, artists, and composers. If there are no items for one of these, such as in Figure 33, where there are no rock playlists, you won’t see an entry.
You can drill down as much as you want until you find the item you want to play. When you’ve found it, just press Return. iTunes launches if it wasn’t already open and begins playing the song, as well as any music that follows it in your iTunes library. So if you’ve picked a song on an album, you’ve queued that song and those that follow. If you’ve picked a song from a playlist, iTunes plays that song and then those that follow in the playlist.
When you’re busy at work, and the phone rings, you need to stop the music you’re playing with iTunes. Or if you’re listening to an album or playlist, you may want to skip a track, and not be bothered having to switch to iTunes to do it. LaunchBar can help.
LaunchBar’s Actions feature contains several actions that let you control iTunes: you can play and pause your music, skip ahead to the next track, go back a track, fast forward, rewind, and even update your podcasts. You can view these options easily by typing, say, IT, and looking in the search results, as shown in Figure 34.
To activate one of these actions, select it and press Return. You can Assign Custom Abbreviations to the ones you use often. For example, the Play/Pause action may be the most useful; I’ve set that to pop up when I type PP. You could use, say, NS for next song, PS for previous song, and so on. If you learn to use these with Instant Open, you’ll find that you can control iTunes very quickly without switching to its window.
You can see all these actions, and choose to show or hide any of them, in the LaunchBar index, discussed in Control the Index.
If you’d rather not click around in iTunes to open the store and search for some media item or app that you’d like to download, you can avoid that rigmarole with LaunchBar.
To search the iTunes Store from the bar:
The bar displays a Search iTunes Store field.
LaunchBar sends the search to iTunes, which displays the results just as though you had searched within the app itself.