Breakaway: Headphone Jack Manipulation

Posted by Jacob Schulman on 03/22/08 in Audio, Featured, Utilities

Logo 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.

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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.

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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.

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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].

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4 Comment(s)

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Greg Healy said on

March 22nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm

Nice find. This has happened to me many times before as well.

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macgasm said on

March 22nd, 2008 at 6:29 pm

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).

Shawin said on

March 23rd, 2008 at 11:29 am

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?

Trine said on

March 26th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

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.

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