Wednesday, September 10, 2008

AOL Radio for Mac 2.0 beta - good, annoying song change popups - bad.

I've been using AOL Radio for Mac 1.2.1 for a while, and was somewhat disappointed when I found out it was being discontinued. I decided to take the plunge and get the AOL Radio for Mac 2.0 beta version, even though it was a beta. It didn't pick up my presets from 1.2.1, but since I only had two saved, it wasn't that hard to redo them. The sound was just as good (as streaming music goes), but there was one very annoying feature that bugged me.

At every song change, it showed a little 'popup' of the new song and title. It was cool at first, but soon got very annoying. A quick check and I found out there was no preferences for the app. Zero, zilch, nada. There has to be some way to turn this off.

Dropping to a command shell, I ran 'default domains', and saw 'com.aol.radio.desktop'.

Running 'default read com.aol.radio.desktop' dumped my presets and a bunch of other info, but nothing that indicated what would change this annoying popup behavior.

Looking in '/Applications/AOL Radio.app/Contents/Resources' turned up a plist file that contained:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/
PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>show_nowplaying_overlay</key>
<true/>
<key>update_notice_current</key>
<true/>
<key>update_notice_all</key>
<false/>
<key>log_verbosity</key>
<integer>0</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

I changed both the <true/> values to false (although I probably only needed to change the 'show_nowplaying_overlay' one), and then restarted the app. Vioila, no more annoying song change popups.

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