Exploit iOS autoplay-on-connect bug for greater joy

Current First Play Track.png

First Play Pool.png

Next First Play Track.png

Rename Track for First Play.scpt

property prefix : "A A "
property current : "Current First Play Track"
property next : "Next First Play Track"

on run
	demoteCurrentTrack()
	promoteNextTrack()
end run

on demoteCurrentTrack()
	tell application "iTunes"
		repeat with t in every track of playlist named current
			if name of t starts with prefix then
				set name of t to ((characters ((length of prefix) + 1) thru -1 of (name of t as string)) as string)
			end if
		end repeat
	end tell
end demoteCurrentTrack

on promoteNextTrack()
	tell application "iTunes"
		repeat with t in every track of playlist named next
			set name of t to (prefix & name of t)
		end repeat
	end tell
	refreshPlaylist(next)
end promoteNextTrack

on refreshPlaylist(playlistName)
	tell application "iTunes"
		delete tracks in playlist named playlistName
	end tell
end refreshPlaylist

I found myself vexed by the way iOS arbitrarily chooses to play a song whenever I connect my phone to my car. Vexed because it's a dumb thing to do, and vexed because I had no control over which song got played, because it was always just the first one alphabetically.

But wait... that means that I do have control!

I created three playlists in my iTunes library. First, a playlist of songs that I might want to hear as I plugged my phone into my car:

Then a playlist that randomly selects one of those songs:

And then a playlist that shows all of my songs from that pool that have been tricked out to be alphabetically first in my library:

And then I wrote a little script that renames songs to move them between those playlists and (for completeness), scheduled cron to call that script every night:

0 2 * * * osascript "/path/to/Rename Track for First Play.scpt"