This is brilliant! I’d gladly pay money for this! Consider a kickstarter. And it doesn’t need a volume knob or relays that turn on lights or any other silly idea.

I was thinking moments ago “Wow, I wish I could listen to iTunes and just rate songs on the fly, a la pandora.” I come to hackaday, and BAM! My wish made manifest. I will now dust off my Arduino.

P.S: I’m now thinking really hard about a Ferrari and the ability to spin code into gold. I’ll check back in a few minutes.

I wrote an applescript that will easily send the current track data from itunes to a serialport (serialportX i think it’s called gives you access to serial ports in applescript). I would look at the documentation for the itunes applescript interface, I’d bet there’s a way to rate the currently playing track. It should be very easy to do with an arduino.

And it works across reboots no problem. The only thing that’s not optimal is that you have to specify the serial port in the applescript, and that is specific to the arduino (not sure if it’s teh model or the specific device), so if I want to use this with a teensy instead of an arduino, I have to modify one line in the script.