Music (was iTunes) and Skipped vs Played - ish

Turns out, Apple's macOS Music app, uses some arcane rules to determine if and when a track is logged as a Skip, or Played.

Which doesn't much matter - unless you want to use that info in a Smart Playlist. 😕

I want to listen to something different, so I use that metadata, to filter out tracks either recently listened to, or recently skipped - which shakes things up nicely.

For awhile now, it's been nagging at me, that I seemed to be hearing tracks I should't - a bit of research led to the link above. I frequently hit the FF button within the first few seconds, so those don't count as Skips. 😕

I wrote a quick AppleScript to use, instead of the default FF button, and force a Skip (by first moving playback to the 6s mark); I use it on a Quicksilver Trigger (see p. 34 of the Quicksilver manual) - though you can use this code however you like:

tell application "Music"

if player state is playing then

set player position to 6

next track

end if

end tell

I'm no expert at Quicksilver Triggers, however here's how I set it up:

• Open Quicksilver and navigate to Triggers (icon in top menu).
• Press dot (period), in the top pane, to be able to paste text.
• Paste the code above (newlines and all).
• The 2nd pane may already be set to the proper kind of code execution: "Run as AppleScript".
• If not, set that.
• If it's not available, you may have to enable that Action.
• Click "Save".
• Click into the "Trigger" column (right), to assign a hotkey.