It’s not always what you want, like if you want to browse your music and pick one song at a time to play, or if you want to build a custom playlist. But if you want to play all songs in a directory, or a bunch of songs with some word (e.g. band or album name) in the file name, it’s great because you can be playing the song in about 5 seconds, without starting up iTunes and doing a search within the GUI.

Here’s how I’m using it at the moment, to play all the songs I have by Foals:

cd ~/Music
find . -type f |grep -i foals|play -vr


First I change directory to my music directory, then use find with grep to find all files that have the word ‘foals’ in their filename; and then just pipe that list to play -vr. Pretty quick, pretty simple.

The command line options -vr are “v” to display the name of the song currently playing, and “r” to play the list in a random order.

Update!

I became bored with typing all that find and grep guff, so I thought I would take a few minutes and quickly write a shell script that does it for me, all I wanted to have to do is type play search1 search2 and it would go.

A couple of hours of feature creep later, it now lists and counts the songs before playing them, and you can put an -r argument before or after the search keywords for a randomly ordered playlist. Here’s the script source:

So now, with the script in my path and a symlink named path, if I want to hear, say, Day ‘N’ Nite by Kid Cudi, I can just type:
play cudi.*nite
It’s still pretty nerdy cause you have to do regex-style search expressions. If I want to hear every song with “bass” in the title in random order, I do:
play bass -r

Here’s an example of it in use playing some British India:

Was a great way to spend a Sunday arvo with a few drinks (not alcoholic for me because I’m off it for 30 days!) and having a chat, Anna’s really talented and entertaining.

How does this relate to rotating a video clip on Mac OSX? I’m glad you asked.

Well, I had my cheap and cheerful digital camera with me and I took a video of the last 30 seconds of Anna cracking out Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. As you can see I have uploaded the video to Youtube for your viewing pleasure, but my plan came unstuck when I realised that I had recorded the video with my camera on end (you might call this “portrait” mode), and this meant that the video would be sideways on Youtube when it was uploaded. Not good.

I opened up iMovie HD with the plan of just rotating the video there, exporting it and uploading the clip to Youtube, job done. But no. iMovie HD as it comes with OSX 10.4 doesn’t rotate video — it only has every other effect known to man, but nothing that you actually need, like being able to rotate a clip.

My usual googling around didn’t turn up too much useful stuff at first as I found things like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and QuickTime Pro — well they cost money and I’m a tightarse so I don’t really want to be dropping cash on software just to rotate a single thirty-second video by 90 degrees. So I persevered and then I found a couple of interesting links, the first of which was an iMovie plugin called Simple Rotate. I downloaded Simple Rotate and I’m sure it’s good but I didn’t use it because I then found MPEG Streamclip, an awesome but not very intuitive thing that can export to a zillion formats and even rotates, crops, resizes and a bunch more stuffs. So I imported my QuickTime MOV (that’s what Kodak cameras save videos as) into MPEG Streamclip, then exported as an MPEG4 with AAC audio. I messed around with the cropping settings, set “rotate” to 90 degrees, clicked the “Make MP4″ button and voila! The video file was even smaller than the original so it was quicker to upload to Youtube.

Unfortunately the video I created was a little bit too narrow (because it was created from portrait mode, remember?) so Youtube stretches the clip horizontally, which sucks.

But I don’t want to end this post on a bad note, so in other news, today I went waterskiing! It was with the Brisbane Waterski club where the club members will gladly take you out on the river at Jindalee and help you learn to ski, giving you tips on what you’re doing wrong and, in my case, drive the boat around in circles to come and pick you up after you stack it, again and again. It’s great fun — next week I’ll be standing up for sure. Fingers crossed.