How to give each of your Mac’s Spaces a custom sound 👂🏻

We all know about the MacOS feature called Spaces, and many of us love splitting our projects, work, and hobbies across our virtual desktops.

What if you could not just assign a name to each Space but also assign a custom Internet radio station to each one too? As you move between them, immersive sound would automatically start playing. Thanks to AppleScript support in Broadcasts (by Steve Troughton-Smith), this is possible! (Skip ahead to the video below to see it in action.) Here’s a common use case:

Say you’re studying a second language and arrange your learning materials in a Space you call “Spanish”. I’ll share a script below that…. When you move into your “Spanish” Space, will tell Broadcasts to play a radio station by its name, in this case “Cadena SER España“. Let’s say you want another Space for all things related to your hometown sports team. In my case, this would be the Texas Longhorns. So when I move into “Sports”, we’ll play from the “104.9 The Horn Austin Sports Talk” station. Great! I love programming to electronica, so I’ve set my “coding” Room to play the excellent station “Monstercat“, and – just for kicks – set the OS to Dark Mode.

But there’s just one thing though… What about our other Spaces? In this demo, the script has been written to tell Broadcasts to automatically pause its playback when it goes to any other Room (and turn off Dark Mode).

For more ideas on what could be automatically triggered upon entering/leaving Spaces, check out this blog post! 💡

How it’s done

First, you’re going to need to have Broadcasts. Check it out, and if you like it, grab the full version (it’s currently a $5 in-app purchase).

Next, you’re going to need CurrentKey Stats (App Store link), which is free.

The tutorial video below will show you how to do everything from scratch in under five four minutes!

The steps in the video involve:

1. Opening CurrentKey and Broadcasts.
2. Adding the Stations you want in Broadcasts.
3. Naming the Spaces you want in CurrentKey.
4. Enabling AppleScript support in CurrentKey.
5. Moving this script (modified for the Stations/Spaces you want), to CurrentKey’s Scripts folder.
6. Clicking OK on the Mac’s permissions dialog so CurrentKey can talk to Broadcasts (and if you want the Dark Mode functionality, the System Preferences).

That’s it!

For more about the other new features in CurrentKey Stats 3.0, check out the latest blog posts.

The idea had a minor splash on Twitter, and that was fun to see.