i am daniel gempesaw

I found an OS X app that lets you use any keyboard shortcut to interact with Google Music within a Chrome or Safari browser. Josh Halickman wrote Google Music Keys and made it available on github. That is pretty sweet, but due to a recent change that Google implemented, it has stopped working! But, I won’t be stopped - gotta have my global shortcuts :D

The app finds Google Music by looking for a tab entitled “Google Music,” but since Google incorporated Music into Play, the tab name no longer has “Google Music” in it; instead it has “Google Play.” It’s a simple one-liner change (s/Play/Music/) and there’s a pull request open but the original author seems unresponsive on Github. In order to create a binary of it myself with the fix, I’d need to install and fiddle with Xcode; I don’t have it installed and I don’t want to bother with Xcode if I can help it, as I’m entirely ignorant about it.

Another alternative suggested in the pull request is to use a HEX editor to edit the already-compiled binary. I tried using HexFiend and made the necessary change, but I guess I did something wrong, because the .app wouldn’t start up afterwards.

So, I couldn’t convince the app to look for a tab with a different title. No big deal; I’ll just change the title of the Google Music tab with a Chrome extension. document.title = "Google Music"; and, done! Except, bummer, every time Music starts playing a new song, it changes the document.title to $song-title - $song-author - Google Play. Looks like I’ll have to figure out how to set up a listener of sorts on the title and change it every time Music changes it. Alternatively, I could just look it up on stackoverflow and not have to do any work of my own!

Changing the console.log line to changing the title is the only modification needed - I didn’t learn a single thing about javascript yet again =/ But, it works :D! Previous, Play/Pause and Next all go to my Google Music tab inside of Chrome, not Spotify or iTunes. Thank goodness :)