A long-standing passion of mine is listening to and collecting music. I’m always on the lookout for new music and where I discover it is primarily from internet radio stations. That said, listening to music in such a way is largely a passive activity, where your main focus is somewhere else. The better music players that acknowledge this difference in focus provide mechanisms for remote-controlling them from other apps. So it is with the Triode app for macOS, which leverages Cocoa frameworks (App Intents in particular) to support remote control.

triode.el is an Emacs Lisp library which provides a simple remote control interface to the Triode app. Basic support for selecting a radio station, play/stop, and muting are provided. Not every feature in the Triode app is accessible to triode.el though; this is controlled by the App Intents actually implemented by its developer, The Iconfactory.

Interested readers can learn more about triode.el in its user guide.

triode.el is now available on MELPA. This release joins my other packages that support remote control of music apps on macOS from Emacs:

• now-playing.el - Interface for the Music app.
• shazam.el - Interface for Shazam music recognition.

All the above efforts have been an exploration of malleable computing using Emacs as the main orchestration tool. I plan on posting a more technical deep dive reflecting this work in the not too distant future. That said, if you’re a macOS user who uses Emacs and Triode, I encourage you to give triode.el a try. Also, consider this a plug for Triode app, a well-designed app that does a great job of taking advantage of the Cocoa frameworks to provide internet radio across different devices provided by Apple.

emacs   macos