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January 2024

May 28 2014 - 4:50 pm

NEW: URL Track Info

I'm not sure when it happened, but the tags of URL tracks—internet streaming tracks—cannot be edited in the iTunes Get Info window. A Correspondent who apparently regularly made use of this ability recently drew my attention to it and inquired about a workaround.

URL Track Info will let you edit some of the tags of a selected URL track.

If you select more than one URL track it behaves like a multi-item edit window.

I didn't see much point in using a lot of tags, especially those in common with regular audio file tracks. You really want to keep these things away from file tracks in a playlist since they sort of hijack the flow when they come up for play.

More information and download is here.

May 28 2014 - 2:44 pm

Apple Releases iTunes 11.2.2

Apple has released iTunes 11.2.2 which fixes some podcasting downloading issues.

May 25 2014 - 11:33 am

NEW: Refresh Smart Playlists v1.0

For years my go-to Smart Playlist has been one called "100 Songs Or So", which is essentially a bunch of tracks that haven't been played in a few months (plus no Holiday tracks, songs shorter than ten minutes, and so on). Early on I figured out that the contents of "100 Songs Or So" could be refreshed by deleting all its tracks and allowing it to dynamically re-populate.

It was suggested to me recently that it might be advantageous to perform this kind of refresh on more than one SP at a time—say, just before you sync them to a device. Sometimes I wonder why I don't think of these things.

Refresh Smart Playlists will display a panel from which you can select the Smart Playlists in iTunes that you want to re-populate. Click the refresh button and they're instantly updated.

The Smart Playlists you've selected will be remembered the next time you launch the script so you can quickly refresh your favored SPs without having to select them each launch.

Not every Smart Playlist is "refreshable", of course. For example, if a Smart Playlist already contains every track from the library that meets its criteria, its tracks can't be deleted. A Smart Playlist that uses "Limit to" and "Live updating" criteria is more inclined to be dynamic.

More information and download is here.

May 24 2014 - 11:46 am

Daypart v2.3.0 Released

I posted a revamped Daypart, my app for scheduling iTunes playlists, the other day.

iTunes 11 broke Daypart when Apple dropped AppleScript support for managing an individual playlist's shuffle and repeat. Not only did controlling shuffle and repeat provide obvious playlist-scheduling options but I also used it to help prevent train wrecks at playlist segues.

Well, I finally worked around all that in Daypart 2.3.0. But you still have to set iTunes shuffle manually.

Additionally, Daypart has been updated to work better in Mavericks, has a redesigned Player window, and has many minor tweaks to keep it chugging along. It's a free update for registered users (thanks for your patience) and $10 if you're a new user.

May 24 2014 - 11:26 am

UPDATED: List MIAs v3.2

List MIAs v3.2 checks your entire iTunes library for missing and presumed dead tracks—those tracks that iTunes is unable to associate with a file and which are listed in iTunes with a "!"—and displays them allowing you to delete them from iTunes or export a text file listing them by alleged File Path (if available), Song Name, Artist and Album, which you can view using TextEdit.

This latest version auto-saves the window and columns sizes (this is kind of awkward to do with Cocoa-AppleScript) and has other minor performance tweaks.

More information and download is here. If you use it and like it a donation would be greatly appreciated.

May 20 2014 - 10:23 am

UPDATED: Merge-Delete Playlists v3.3

Merge-Delete Playlists will allow you to merge the track contents of two or more playlists or delete any number of playlists at once, including Smart, Genius, and Playlist Folder playlists. The merge feature will prevent the same tracks that may appear in different source playlists from being duplicated and has an option to delete original playlists. The delete feature only deletes the playlist; tracks, of course, remain in the library.

This latest version fixes issues running under Mavericks and fixes a problem re-enabling after a delete operation.

More information and download is here.

May 17 2014 - 7:53 am

iTunes 11.2.1 Fixes Users Folder Bug

That didn't take long.

May 16 2014 - 3:49 pm

Genius Playlists Can Be Shuffled

So I just discovered that everytime I play a Genius playlist it plays in the same order. My guess is that everybody else already knew that.

Today, however, I discovered that if you place a Genius playlist inside a Playlist Folder and then select the Playlist Folder, set it to shuffle, and then play, the songs play shuffled. That is, the tracks play in a different random order each time the Playlist Folder containing the Genius playlist is played.

When I told Kirk McElhearn about this he imagined that one could create several Genius Playlists based on the same Artist seed in order to maximize variety. So I tried that. And here's what's cool:

My presumption was that two (or more) Genius Playlists based on a similar seed each might contain duplicate tracks which would therefore be duplicated in the Playlist Folder that I put them in. But they are not. While the two Genius Playlists show 100 songs each, the total of tracks for the Playlist Folder is 174; the duplicate tracks don't "register" in the Playlist Folder context.

I like this because I can maintain the Genius playlists longer without having to refresh or recreate them.

May 16 2014 - 8:46 am

OS X 10.9.3 Update Hides Users Folder

Many users updating to OS 10.9.3 are reporting that their /Users folder is set to be hidden, not unlike how the ~/Library folder is hidden by default. However, this behavior is not happening to everyone, including me (but I have only updated one machine).

Perhaps needless to say: installing AppleScripts into any of the appropriate folders in the Users directory will be somewhat impeded by this phenomenon.

Bug or feature characterizations aside, if your Users folder is hidden after installing OS X 10.9.3, several people are suggesting resetting the "hidden" flag of the folder; but this flag is evidently re-set back to hidden on a restart of the machine. A relatively more thorough fix is suggested on the French MacBidouille forum and is also listed in the comments of Chris Breen's Unhiding the Users folder article at MacWorld. This fix has you reset PRAM, repair permissions, and then reset permissions on the Users folder.

Among other workarounds: From the Finder's "Go" menu click "Go to Folder..." and type in "/Users". Once open, drag the folder icon in the title bar to the "Favorites" section in the window's sidebar. The folder will continue to be hidden in the Finder but can now be accessed from the sidebar.

UPDATE: According to The Mac Observer this issue is related to having Find My Mac enabled and the iTunes 11.2 update and not specifically the OS X 10.9.3 update.

UPDATE ALSO: Apple fixed the issue in the iTunes 11.2.1 release on May 17.

May 15 2014 - 1:27 pm

Apple Releases iTunes 11.2

iTunes 11.2 is out and primarily fixes some Podcast management features, fixes unresponsive Genius updating (I had that!), and (as usual) improvements to overall performance and stability.

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