Breakaway: Headphone Jack Manipulation
How many times have you been listening to music on iTunes through your headphones in a quiet location and you inadvertently pull them out of the plug only for the music to continue blasting away through the speakers of your Mac portable? Well personally, this has happened to me a slew of times and the feeling is truly embarrassing. However, Breakaway from [[Alloc]Init] is the simple application that can prevent this from ever happening again.
The lightweight (<6mb) app can make itself at home in your menu bar or in your dock. When it's activated, a tiny icon appears as a menu bar item (by default) in the top part of your screen. Two different icons can tell you if Breakaway senses that your headphones are plugged in or not. In addition, if you have Growl notifications installed on your machine, Breakaway will tap into Growl and you will get a little notification about the status of your headphones.
The true power of Breakaway is realized when you tick off one of the options not enabled by default. Breakaway will automatically pause your music when the headphones are pulled out (albeit, with a very slight delay) and will un-pause the music when you plug them back in. The switch is really fairly seamless, and I only heard a tiny delay when I pulled out my headphones a couple of times. The preferences panel is fairly detailed, and allows you to manipulate a lot of the functionality of Breakaway to your liking.
However, Breakaway’s usefulness doesn’t stop with the iTunes pausing. Included with the free download is a slew of additional scripts that you can configure to do things like setting your iChat status, Skype status, or other things of that nature. These scripts are all in the familiar AppleScript format, so they can be edited to your liking, and you can probably create scripts of your own.
There’s actually a lot more functionality to this handy app, and I’m barely scratching the surface. However, one thing I’d really like to see is the ability for Breakaway to fade in the music when you plug the headphones back in, as it would be a nice Mac-like and very Apple-like touch. It would also make it a lot smoother to continue listening to your favorite tunes.
Breakaway is a free app and you can download it from [[Alloc]Init].
Nice find. This has happened to me many times before as well.
SoundSource does this as well. It’s a little bit flaky on my machine at times, but generally it mutes the volume when I yank out my headset (both usb and normal).
The sound level or my macbook is different for headphones and the in-built speaker. When it’s muted and I plug in my headphones, I get sound. When I unplug it, the sound is automatically muted and doesn’t blast though my speakers like you say. It’s been there forever without any additional software. Is it just me or what?
[...] Breakaway: Headphone Jack Awareness for your Mac (tags: apple leopard macbook osx itunes macosx mac mp3) [...]
To Shawin:
Not at all, I think it’s pretty standard, ’cause I have the same thing on my MacBook. But Breakaway is handy, I guess, when you don’t have your mac (with unplugged headphones) on mute before you yank out the headphones.
This is a great app! Thanks for the info and link. It’s immediately come in handy, I hate bombarding those around me with my music… additionally, I frequently use the same headset for my mobile and when I’m listening to music, I pull the headset out and plug it into my cell…. occasionally forgetting to silence my music first, this totally solves the problem.
Awesome!
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