Expert’s Rating
Our Verdict
If you like to listen to music while you turn ( or recreate ) at your computing machine , how many times has this happened to you : You ’re jamming away to your favorite strain , then something prompts you to pause playback — perhaps the phone rang , or a co - worker stop over by for a confabulation , or an email message or tweet suggested a funny online video . Though the interruption likely last only a few mo , an 60 minutes or more later you actualize you ’d been sitting in secrecy . You forgot to click toy again . ( Yes , this is clearly a First - World Problem . )
Take Five(Mac App Store link ) is a bang-up app that ensures you ’ll never have to endure such wanting - minded silence again . Whenever a temporary break occurs , just click the Take Five image in the Dock ( or click the pause release in Take Five ’s systemwide computer menu , or press Take Five ’s configurable keyboard cutoff ) , and sensitive playback is paused for the distance of prison term you delimitate . When that clip is up — the countdown appear in the carte bar — Take Five automatically resumes playback , your music gently evanesce back in , and you ’re back to jamming .
I admit to being a spot doubting of Take Five when I first tried it — my first thought was essentially , “ Is this really necessary ? ” But once you intermit playback and then , 10 minutes later , try the euphony slicing back in — often after all forget you ’d hesitate it — you begin to appreciate how Take Five can fall in handy .
You choose the default length of Take Five ’s pause—1 , 2 , 5 , 10 , 15 , or 30 minutes — in Take Five ’s preference windowpane , or you could choose a dissimilar length of time for a peculiar pause using Take Five ’s menu . ( If you want to break playback indefinitely , you just selection - fall into place the Pause button . Of course , you’re able to manually resume playback at any time . ) By nonremittal , Take Five mastery iTunes , but you could instead choose to have it controlEcoute , Pulsar , Radium ( ) , Rdio , orSpotify . When curb iTunes , you’re able to also configure Take Five to take over the Play / Pause key on Apple ’s keyboard and compatible third - company keyboards with a gambol / Pause key .
As an all - sidereal day music auditor , Take Five ’s temporary - intermission feature film alone is useful — if admittedly frivolous — to me . But Take Five has a number of other features that add up utility . For object lesson , the Take Five window ( which is really more of an iOS - expressive style dad - over ) that appears when you flick the program ’s menu - stripe picture shows the current track ’s name , artist , album name , and cover art ; sink in the cover nontextual matter reveals the cartroad in your music player ( if the participant brook this characteristic ) . But what I really like here is that , similar to Mac Gems best-loved CoverSutra , Take Five can temporarily expose this informational pop - over whenever the track changes , and you could set up a keyboard crosscut to show this display whenever you require to see what ’s playing .
Unfortunately , Take Five does n’t provide any other playback controls — you’ll necessitate to switch over to your euphony - playing computer program to change rail or playlists , though Take Five does let you configure a keyboard shortcut to open that euphony political program . I ’d love to see at least Previous and Next button in Take Five ’s pop - over display . But Take Five does on the nose what it aims to do , and , in typical Iconfactory fashion , it does so with a beautiful and easy - to - use interface .
