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Skip Forward & Backward (Gestures In iTunes)

I have been using iTunes (on the Mac) and Podcasts (on the iPhone and iPad) to play my podcasts now that it actually syncs correctly. Side Note: I don’t know what they finally did to make it work , but thank you! On the iOS app you are given a convenient 15 second forward and back button to use when you are listening to podcasts, and it’s a very nice feature that you find in most podcast players. The problem is that when listening to podcasts using iTunes on the Mac, you only have the skip buttons, and that takes you to the next track (or podcast). This is not ideal at all for listening to podcasts, so I needed a way to add the 15 second, or any length for that matter, skip forward and backward functionality. I figured that AppleScript was my best bet for solving this problem so I did some searching around before diving in and reinventing the wheel, and came out with a couple good starting points. I found a couple different AppleScripts that did what I needed for the most part, so it was time to figure out how best to implement them for me. Check out the scripts and modify as needed to suit your needs.

I first started down the path of simply assigning scripts to fire when certain keyboard shortcuts were pressed using Keyboard Maestro. This absolutely worked, but it didn’t quite seem as fast or elegant as I would like. Then it dawned on me, I should use mouse gestures! I switched over to using an Apple Magic Trackpad about a month or so back and LOVE IT! Using BetterTouchTool, you can pretty much make up whatever you want with almost any input device to fire off all kinds of actions. The setup I chose is pretty simple. I decided to go with a fairly simple four finger swipe to the left or to the right. With this gesture I can now skip forward or backward with a simple gesture and it's great! Also because this gesture is global, it can be done regardless of what application I am using.

There you have it, if you have been looking for a convenient way to skip forward and backward a predefined amount of time in iTunes, this could be the answer for you!