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Turn mac mini into a CD player

2024-01-02

I love music, after reading this article from NYtimes, I just realize that it’s time for me to start a physical music collection.

After some search and thought, I think CD is the perfect media to do it:

It’s easy and cheap: Once you purchase a CD burner (which costs about $10), you can burn any music you like with a click, and CD-R discs are cheap (about $0.30 per disc);
a lot of music to choose: you can purchase music from iTunes Store which has latest and many old recordings;
All the major record companies still sell CDs;
It has very high audio quality;
I still have a car with a built-in CD player, I can simply take the music I like for a trip;

I want to enjoy music without any disruptions, including a GUI.

So I decide to turn my daily computer(a mac mini) into a CD player.

I have an external CD burner connected to the Mac Mini, to make it a CD player, I need to implement these features:

autoplay any CD I insert into external CD burner;
Control it by keyboard to:
- skip forware/backward
- Turn the volume up/down
- eject CD

Seems like it’s a once built-in feature for Music app, but now for some reason it’s gone, although the feature still has a support page:

You can now implement this feature with:

Screenshot 2024-01-02 at 22 07 42

The basic idea is to config macOS to launch a Automator App when a audio CD inserted which launch mpv to play CD.

I have a HHKB keyboard which don’t come with any media playback key, so I’ll need to create some global keybinds.

First, I tried the built-in solution like: Shortcuts, looks like it’s not very stable and the shortcuts don’t work every time.

Then I find karabiner-elements which works very well and even have built-in config to map function keys as media playback keys:

The only configuration I need is to make the eject function work:

The trick part here is to first stop mpv before calling diskutil to eject CD.

You can find all the scripts here:

That’s it, enjoy your CDs now!