Turn your MacBook eject key into a rimshot button
When I left Adobe, I returned my company laptop. Since then, I’ve been test-driving a borrowed Macbook Air from fellow Studiomate Skylar Challand (Canadians are so nice!). While using the laptop, I realized something strange—even though it lacks a disc drive, it still has an eject key. This is understandable because of the optional USB superdrive, but the last time I actually used a disc drive was to burn the MP3s I downloaded from Limewire.
Half-joking, I tweeted this:
The eject key on the Macbook Air is completely worthless and should be re-mapped to play a rimshot sound.
— Jonnie Hallman (@destroytoday) April 17, 2012
Before the tweet could load, I knew I had to follow through. And within 15 minutes, I had a solution.
Disclaimer: There are probably dozens of easier ways to do this, but this is the first way that came to mind.
-
Download KeyRemap4MacBook
KeyRemap4MacBook is a free preference pane app. I would describe it, but it’s one of those apps that skips all the cutesy names and tells you exactly what it does.
-
Map the eject key to F13
Go to the KeyRemap4MacBook preference pane, search for ‘eject f13’ and check its box. I use F13 because, on my computer at least, it isn’t mapped to anything.
-
Download rimshot MP3 from instantrimshot.com
If you haven’t been to instantrimshot.com, you aren’t telling enough jokes in the workplace. I ended up scrubbing the HTML to find the MP3 file, but you can just download it here.
-
Create Alfred extension to play MP3 using afplay
I skipped writing a step for downloading Alfred and purchasing the Powerpack because I assume you already have them. If not, 5 points taken from Gryffindor! Open the preferences and under ‘Extensions’, create a shell script as seen below. Ever since Leopard, OSX comes bundled with a binary called ‘afplay’ that lets you play audio files from the command line. Incredibly useful in this case.
-
Create global hotkey for extension
Lastly, go to the ‘Hotkeys’ tab and create a global hotkey for your shell script and map it to F13.
Try it out and let me know how it goes!
