PianoKeys — Control Pianobar using your Mac's media keys

I was really annoyed that I couldn't control Pianobar using the media keys on my Mac, so I wrote an app that does it.

Features

• Pause/play will do what it's supposed to
• Hold the pause/play key to "love" a track
• Fast forward will also do what it's supposed to
• Hold the fast forward key to "ban" a track
• PianoKeys will automatically terminate after Pianobar closes

Building

You should be able to just open the Xcode project and build. I developed the app using Xcode 4.2.

Installation

The installation requires a few steps, but it's pretty easy to get up and running, here's what you need to do:

1. Add this to your Pianobar configuration file (~/.config/pianobar/config)

    fifo = /Users/USERNAME/.config/pianobar/ctl
   

2. Create the file pipe

    mkfifo /Users/USERNAME/.config/pianobar/ctl
   

3. If you have Xcode: Install the application using Xcode from terminal

    # From the project root directory
    xcodebuild -configuration Release install  # installs into /usr/local/bin
   

4. If you downloaded the binary: Copy the pianokeys binary into your $PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin)

    cp ./pianokeys /usr/local/bin
   

5. (Optional) Create a cool alias to start PianoKeys when you start Pianobar

    # Add this to your shell's rc file (e.g. ~/.bashrc)
    alias pianobar='pianokeys && pianobar'
   

That's it! You should be able to start pianokeys and pianobar together.

Note: PianoKeys will terminate itself if Pianobar is not running after 5 seconds— just keep that in mind when starting it up.