Denied - Skip Terrible Music

Import and Export Rules

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 14:00:00 +0100

I've always wanted for Denied to become a way to share your distate for certain bands, artists, songs and musical genres.

Last week I released Denied v1.4.0 which adds the option to export your existing rules and import those in any other copy of Denied. With this being the Holiday season, it might be the perfect time to compile your list of worst Christmas songs and share them with your friends and family.

The process is as easy as launching Denied, clicking the menu bar icon, selecting "Manage Rules" and then clicking either "Export Rules..." or "Import Rules...".

After you export your rule sets, you end with with .deniedrules files. You can either go through the menus or just double-click the file to import the rules contained in them. The process could not be more straightforward.

You can even import multiple sets at once and Denied will ask if you're absolutely sure. So considerate!

I'm a big fan of this feature personally. Stay tuned for more news on cleverly managing rule sets and sharing them with your friends.

Play Music From Spotify Straight to Sonos

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 13:00:00 +0100

I talked about this in the lat post, but the feature has finally been rolled out to all users: you can stream to Sonos directly from the Spotify app!

This is huge for every Sonos owner out there and opens the door for wirelessly streaming songs while still being able to skip songs that you dislike using Denied.

Sonos, Spotify and Denied

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 20:00:00 +0200

Sonos came out with some interesting news today: they've partnered with Spotify to enable control over Sonos speakers directly from Spotify's mobile and desktop apps.

For Denied, this is great news as the official Sonos app is not supported and horrendous songs can reign freely over anyone using a Sonos setup. This future updates should put and end to that.

It's not entirely clear when you can expect this option to land in Spotify's apps, only that it will be in beta this October.

Source: The Next Web

Denied version 1.3.0 came out today

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 13:00:00 +0100

An update was long overdue and the Spotify album art issue was really getting on my nerves. So, here it is: Denied version 1.3.0!

Denied displays Spotify album art again!
Instead of just using the slider, you can now enter the amount of days Denied should remember Repeating Songs.
Updated the update framework.
Brought the rest of the project into 2016 ;).
Bugs were fixed, performance was tweaked.

The update is live on the Mac App Store.

Denied Featured On Spotify.com

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 14:00:00 +0200

I'm super proud to say that Denied is featured on Spotify's Developer Showcast. Which means there's this cool page that lists a few apps that use Spotify's developer interface and DENIED IS ON IT!

The developer showcast highlights apps that use one or more of Spotify's methods to control the desktop app or retrieve information from their immense song database. Denied uses AppleScript to control the OS X desktop app and uses the database to check for songs that contain explicit lyrics.

Spotify's Completely Fixed! (Almost)

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 17:00:00 +0200

Spotify version 1.0.3 is being rolled out and AppleScript seems to be working as it should again! Well, almost. Everything works, except the album artwork. So while Denied will once again save your ears from the scum music of the earth, you can't see what the album cover looks like.

While the black hole of despair is actually looking quite fitting in Denied, I've contacted Spotify once more to go in and fix the AppleScript stuff for good this time.

Fixing Spotify

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 15:00:00 +0100

Spotify released a pretty major update a little while ago. While they introduced all kinds of interesting new features, they also broke some old ones, like support for remote controlling the desktop client using 'AppleScript'.

Denied uses AppleScript to retrieve information from Spotify and tell it to skip to the next song. Needless to say without AppleScript Denied is pretty bad at saving your ears in Spotify. Note that Rdio and iTunes are unaffected by the way.

Luckily the bug is pretty simple to solve and Spotify has said they're planning to release a definitive fix pretty soon. Until then, you can use this little patch I wrote that will re-enable AppleScript with the click of a button. Super simple.

So, if you're experiencing any trouble using Denied with Spotify, download the patch and start saving your ears from crappy music again!

My Favorite Tracks

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 11:00:00 +0100

Instead of focusing on songs I detest, let's talk about some that I love; totally compensating for all the negativity on this site.

I've made my starred playlist public so you can browse through tracks I've saved. I also religiously 'scrobble plays' to my Last.fm profile. Do you guys still do that? If not, I highly recommend it. Browsing through the 90.000+ tracks I've listened to over the years feels like an incredible trip down memory lane. Plus it allows me to compare my musical taste to Japie.

Upon analyzing my Starred playlist, it seems to be a combination of all-time favorites and spur of the moment stuff that sounded perfect at the right time. An example from the first category would be Glycerine by Bush. It's become sort of a ritual to put it on when I'm testing one of my other apps, called Porthole. Your Love by The Outfield I also never get tired of hearing.

Last.fm indicates that I also listen to an ungodly amount of Punk.

More recently I've been listening to a lot of Chiptune and Synth Pop. I tend to alternate between periods of listening to guitar music and electronic tunes. Computerized songs seem to be winning at the moment — although I thoroughly enjoyed that Black Label Society concert last Saturday!

I'm always on the lookout for new awesome music to listen to, so I'd love to hear about your Starred playlists on Twitter.

New design & new features!

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 16:00:00 +0100

I've teased the 1.2.0 update of Denied in a few previous posts and I'm super stoked to tell you that it's finally here!

To start of this off, let's list everything that's new or changed in this huge update.
Denied now lets you:

Skip songs that contain explicit lyrics.
Skip songs that you’ve heard before in the past few hours.
See which song is currently playing and..
Add rules straight from the Now Playing information.

Also:

The rules adding/editing interface has been completely revised.
Cool animations have been added.
Bugs have been fixed and things tweaked.

The best animation is probably the one you'll never see. It happens when you pause or un-pause your music player.

The gif above also shows the flow of adding a new rule based on the song that's currently playing. The final version shows the amount of rules you've setup. Pretty neat.

Skipping repeating songs and tracks that contains explicit content are the two major new features. Both are disabled by default, but introduce powerful new methods to passively skip over music you don't want to hear.

With the repeating song feature, you can set a timeout (between 30 minutes and 24 hours) and Denied will automatically skip over songs that have been played before in the set amount of time. I love this option when I listen to some Spotify Radio stations that have a limited amount of tracks.

The explicit content filter checks if songs are labeled as containing explicit lyrics. If you're listening with kids, or other sensitive ears, this feature will surely come in handy. Note that while it works with Spotify, Rdio and iTunes, the song has to be available in Spotify's library and you need to be connected to the internet.

I hope you enjoy this update! Feel free to contact me with feedback, questions or anything else via email or on Twitter.

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Making It Move

Fri, 05 Dec 2014 21:00:00 +0100

I've added some animations to the latest build of Denied.