Using growl, quicksilver, and itunes, I’ve got how I like to handle my music listening while I work down to a science.

First, controlling what’s playing. Quicksilver has these cool things called triggers. Triggers allow you to assign an action so a single key or key combination. The itunes plugin for quicksilver comes with a bunch of preset triggers, but skip forward, skip back, and play/pause are really my essentials. I picked three keys on my keyboard that I wasn’t using (F14, F15, F16) and assigned them to each of those actions, respectively. This way I can skip forward or backwards in the current playlist (almost always party shuffle) with a single keystroke, and without changing applications. This is especially great when itunes is open in a different space in leopard.

I also like to rate all my music and then use that rating for different playlists. The itunes plugin also comes with scripts for setting rating, so with 4 keystrokes (ctrl+space to bring up quicksilver, the number, and enter to apply) i can change the rating of the song without switching to itunes.

Last, growl comes with a nice little add-on called growltunes, which pops up a notification showing the album artwork, title, artist and rating when the song changes. I like the music video style because it stays at the bottom and isn’t distracting. Here’s what that looks like:

Sometimes I miss it, so I also assign one more trigger to show the playing track. This way if I’m listening to something new and like it, I can find out who it is, and then rate it, all with a couple quick keystrokes, and without changing applications.

That’s pretty much it, what do you think? How do you listen to music?