Listen to an hourly CNN news update podcast

Jul 21, '05 08:16:00AM

Contributed by: jweill

CNN has an hourly news update distributed as a podcast in iTunes 4.9. This news update is about two minutes long and contains no commercials. I wanted to insert this into the Party Shuffle at the top of each hour, just like real radio stations do ("You're listening to WRCT Pittsburgh; here's the news...").

I set my podcasts to update every hour. This applies to all podcasts; iTunes lacks an option to update just one podcast hourly, and there doesn't seem to be an AppleScript command to update them programmatically. I then modified this hint, which inserts a song into the Party Shuffle list, to insert the newest CNN update into the Party Shuffle if and only if iTunes is playing from that playlist. Here's the modified script. I saved this as ~/Documents/cnn-update.scpt. I then used cron to run this script at the top of every hour:

$ cat > /tmp/entries
0 * * * * osascript /Users/jweill/Documents/cnn-update.scpt
^D (control-D)
$ crontab /tmp/entries
The only downside is that I usually get an e-mail locally that contains some text like "iTunes, iTunes, iTunes, iTunes," or a status message, when the script gets run. I don't know how to suppress that output without just adding > /dev/null to the command in crontab.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050711163429240