10, 9, 8 . . . iTunes Blastoff!

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1....

In my house, dishwashing time is podcast-listening time. When a good episode rolls around, I find myself scrubbing mighty slowly!

The dishes are cleaner than ever these days, thanks to the best-sounding kitchen playback system I've set up yet; it's powered by a pair of Samson StudioDock 4i monitors. In addition to sounding pretty dang good for their size, these amplified speakers have some unique hookup options. There are stereo RCA line inputs on the back, a 1/8" stereo miniphone input on the front, a USB jack and internal digital-to-analog converter for streaming computer audio, and an iPod dock. There's also a 1/8" headphone jack and a real AC line cord instead of an annoying adapter.

None of my three MP3 players is an iPod, so I just plugged in a 1/8"-to-dual-RCA cord. But for some reason, my Mac (where I download and store all my podcasts) stopped recognizing my favorite MP3 player recently. For a while I transferred the files to my PC via the network or a flash drive and then dragged them to the MP3 player, but that got tedious.

Then my eyes lit on my Apple AirPort Express, a compact Wi-Fi audio receiver I'd exploited before. Plugging it in next to the speakers, I was able to stream everything in my iTunes library from the Mac upstairs down to the speakers in the kitchen.

There was one problem, though: I'd miss the first ten seconds or so of the podcast during the time it took me to hit Play in my second-floor office and scamper down the stairs to the kitchen. (I know there are various remote controls for iTunes, but I don't have one.) So I whipped up this AppleScript to trigger playback after a ten-second delay:

tell application "iTunes"

 	repeat with i from 10 to 0 by -1

 		say i using "Ralph"

 		delay 1

 	end repeat

 	play

end tell 

As you can see, it simply counts from 10 down to zero, pausing one second between each number, and then starts playing the selected item in iTunes. Unfortunately, you can't hear the countdown over Wi-Fi, because iTunes streams only its own songs, not the computer's audio. (No, I don't have AirFoil either.)

So hack #2 was to create an audio file of a countdown and plop it into the beginning of an iTunes playlist. Now I start the playlist, gallop downstairs, and arrive just in time to hear the podcast start. A side benefit was discovering that putting podcasts into a playlist lets you hear more than one in a row. Podcasts played from the main iTunes window stop between each episode.

Here's the audio file, created with the Mac speech synthesizer's Vicki voice:

Countdown (158KB MP3)

I ran it through a low-cut filter in BIAS Peak to tame the speech-synth thumps. If you want to generate a more manly countdown MP3, just click the "listen" link at the top of this page, which will convert this text into an MP3. To trim the file the page makes, try MP3 Trimmer (Mac) or mp3DirectCut (Win).