I’ve had my mac for almost a full year now. I honestly don’t remember exactly when I got it but I think it was near the end of June or the beginning of July last year. Coming from Linux and Windows meant I had some choices to make about certain applications I was going to use. One of those choices was Colloquy for IRC. One feature I missed from mIRC and XChat was the ability to accept ctcp SOUND requests to play a sound. My friends and I use this in our own channel as an alert system. A trigger is typed that makes a bot send a ctcp SOUND request to the channel with a filename. We each have these sounds locally installed on our computers so we hear the sound after the request is made.

Today I decided to do something about Colloquy’s lack of sound so I started researching some scripting languages supports by the IRC client. I came across F-Script as a cocoa scripting language based on SmallTalk. Since I’ve always wanted to learn SmallTalk, I gave it a go. After a little bit of time, I was able to figure something out to enable sound requests to play sounds from Colloquy!

You can grab the plugin here (right click and save) and throw it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns directory. Type /fscript load sounds and it should be ready to roll! When a ctcp SOUND request is received, this script will try and find the file in your Sounds folder (i.e. ~/Library/Sounds) and play it automatically for you.