Manuel provides me with proof that the lazyweb works. Inspired by my bedtime musing about having speech synthesis provide occasional track info in the context of iTunes, he busta move and the results (should that be ‘TheResult’?) can be found here.

Looking at the code, the script provides the information for the last three songs, and Manuel hasn’t blocked out globals that could store lists of variables to swap in randomly. It also doesn’t yet perform a count-and-interrupt (where when the script is fired it assigns n to the number of tunes to wait before performing a set break and then pauses the playback before reading the announcements).

Lessee now, I know I wrote something that uses globals…

Ah, here it is. My Applescript for using cron to schedule radio streams in iTunes uses a block to set the way that the script sees the radio streams:

global myPlaylist, theCallSign

set myPlaylist to “a radio selection”
set theCallSign to “KUOW”

This lacks a randomization method, though.

UPDATE: I take it back about the pause-to-announce; Manny has the volume fade to half while Vicki lays the lowdown on ya and brings it back up when she’s done. It made me laugh so hard spittle went flyin.’

What would be great: a handy list of the dialog which the never-seen-on-screen deejay from 1979’s “The Warriors” employs. I think it would be a lovely base for DJ Vicki to rock the talkbox with. Amazingly, no script for the film appears to be online.

Of course, eventually we will need to see what DJ Vicki looks like. Little help, party people?

5 thoughts on “DJ Vicki”

  1. Are you sure we never see the dj? I could swear we have some backlit shot of her at some point in the movie – though it has been many years since I saw it last…

  2. well, parts of her – mostly her mouth – appear on screen.

    She was played by the Chief from “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?”

  3. Casting notes aside, this is a clever thing you’ve come up with.

    I coulda used something similar to automate grabbing the BBC’s recent playing of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide series . . . .

    I think there are some great uses for this.

    PS: Cronnix is now
    “>here.

  4. why, thanks, Paul.

    The iCal method for controlling iTunes on a sched is a bit more apple-y than my cron-based one, I think.

    I’m mulling how to abstract the language-based ordinal refs from the Vicky script so that I can stuff the count of spoken songs and ordinal language into one array and the artist ident and track ident intros into a separate selection array each. If I can figure out how to do that, I can randomize on 1 to 5 and the speech blocks could all be iterated.

    of course, that may be a diminishing-returns kinda thing. and of course it was Manuel that did the legwork and came up with the genius down-and-up fade, which solves a problem by thinking around it rather than against it.

Comments are now closed.