I like using You Tube to listen to rare versions of my favourite songs, but I don’t like to constantly have to reload a page if want to listen to anything more than once —gladly, I have found a solution: it’s called Fake.

Fake is a web browser for Mac OS X that allows for easy web automation. It comes from the same creator of one of my favourite Mac applications: Fluid.

The list of things you can do with Fake is intriguingly long. Anything from placing focus on a specific HTML input element; executing various combinations of else/if statements; dispatching specific mouse events, and even the ability to run any AppleScript script is possible with this application.

Evidently, you can get some really complex actions accomplished with this browser —or really simple ones, like having a video on You Tube play as if it were on “Repeat 1”. Here you can see how easy this is to achieve using Fake.

First, a video showing how this works:

Now, the steps:

1. Open the Action Library panel (the button with the book icon)

2. Search for the Repeat action and drag it into the workflow panel. If you are like me and love to obsessively play the same song over and over, this action will let the entire workflow repeat itself as desired. There is not “unlimited” option here (as it only takes numeric values), so enter the number of times you wish for this process to be repeated.

3. Find the Delay action and drag it directly below the Repeat action. This is where you determine how long will the workflow be delayed for before the next action takes place. In other words, this is where you enter the duration of the video you want to have played repeatedly. The Delay action only takes values in seconds, so calculate how many seconds long is the video you are watching and enter that value inside this action.

4. Find the Reload action and drag it directly below the Repeat action. This will simply reload the web page once the Delay action is done counting however many seconds you entered in it.

5. Finally, find the End Repeat action and drag it directly below the Reload action. This “closes the loop” and makes the Repeat action on top active again.

Voilà! —it starts all over again.

Here’s a image showing how this workflow looks inside the workflow panel: 

Simple, right?

This is just a brief example of how you can use Fake to accomplish a rather easy (yet useful) automation on a web page. I hope you find it as useful as I did.

Unfortunately, Fake did not behave flawlessly at all times. The most common glitch in this particular workflow was the Delay action not “delaying” for the exact amount of time I had entered. Many times, delay would jump to the Reload action halfway through the video; sometimes near the end or sometimes after only a couple of seconds of playback. The application does seem to get updates rather often, so hopefully these issues will eventually stop occurring.

Nevertheless, I suggest you give Fake a try and see how you can make it work towards your needs. (Did I mention it’s free?)

If you discover another fun/useful workflows with this browser, please share them in the comments. I’m interested to know what you can come up with using this great tool.

Now that you have a way to turn “Repeat 1” on You Tube, what do you fancy listening to now?