Pause/Play starts a new song

  1. anonymous

    I just downloaded synergy from the free Mac Heist bundle and I'm having an issue where the podcast I'm listening too is not continued upon playing play (from pause). So I'm listening to a podcast, I hit pause on the synergy buttons and a few minutes later I come back and hit play. Instead of my podcast starting up at the point I left it, the first song in my library starts playing instead. This problem doesn't happen every time, which is adding to the frustration. Any thoughts?

  2. Greg Hurrell

    If I remember correctly, when you hit the button Synergy is actually issuing a "playpause" command to iTunes (ie. "if playing, pause; if paused, play"). It's up to iTunes exactly what action to take when you send it the "playpause" command, and sometimes you get unexpected results, depending on what playlist is selected and so forth.

    You can reproduce and experiment with this using the AppleScript editor (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor). Try running a script like:

    tell application "iTunes.app" to playpause

    And you should observe pretty much the same behaviour as you see with Synergy. It's a quirk in iTunes, I think. I could issue "play" and "pause" explicitly instead of "playpause" but that's actually more problematic than you might think, seeing as iTunes doesn't always correctly report its playing/paused status (and how do you know which command to use if iTunes doesn't tell you its state?).

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