dougscripts.com

January 2024

June 24 2014 - 9:36 am

NEW: Unfinished Podcast Episodes

My Podcasts library is littered with episodes I started playing with good intentions but abandoned. For a while, I was just keeping the 3 most recent episodes and the older unfinished episodes could take a hike in a black hole. But that's only satisfactory if the episodes happen to be time-sensitive. I've got a batch of evergreen episodes that I want to evaluate, but only if I haven't finished listening to them.

Unfinished Podcast Episodes will scan the Podcasts library (media tracks in other libraries that may be podcasts will be ignored) for episodes that have not finished playing and copy them to a playlist named "[-Unfinished Podcast Episodes>".

The script detects that an episode's bookmark-time value—the position at which it was paused or stopped—is less than its duration. The bookmark time will be set if an episode is set to "Remember playback position", the default setting for downloaded podcast episodes. .

More information and download is here.

June 13 2014 - 4:59 pm

NEW: Make Mega Playlist

Make Mega Playlist will allow you to create a "mega" playlist built by appending the tracks of chosen playlists to it in their play order; the effect being that the contents of the mega playlist will play in "playlist" order.

Kirk McElhearn wrote about this script in this Ask the iTunes Guy column at Macworld.

More information and download is here.

June 11 2014 - 7:34 am

The Silent Filtering Treatment

I've maintained the dougscripts.com domain for a number of years now, and I've had my Dot Mac email address since iTools. So it came as a shock when I figured out that Apple has recently started silent filtering any Apple mail messages from any Apple mail account that contain the phrase "dougscripts.com" or even just "dougscripts".

So if I send you an email from my mac/me/icloud address with "dougscripts" in my signature, you won't get it. If you have a mac/me/icloud mail account, you won't receive any mail with the word "dougscripts" in the message body.

So links to scripts, tips, and articles on my site can't be used in iCloud mail messages or they will not be delivered.

I don't know exactly why this has happened but undoubtedly it is because my domain name was used by some unscrupulous spammer. It's not like I send spam.

This is truly disappointing, considering what it is I do here for Apple users. Not being able to use my Apple mail to conduct basic correspondence with Visitors and Correspondents (and Apple's customers) is a heartbreaking irony.

So, if you haven't received a reply from me, try again, and I'll get back to you with my "secondary" email address (which may be getting a promotion). Meanwhile, I'll try lobbying Apple to be removed from the filter.

Update: it occurs to me that an over-zealous algorithm may interpret "dougscripts.com" as a nefarious pharmaceuticals spammer.

Update 2, June 18, 2014: After contacting AppleCare, this issue was eventually resolved during this past weekend. Although Apple was able to confirm that my account was being filtered, they did not say why nor did they actually inform me that the issue was resolved; I only found out after sending myself a test mail every few hours.

Update 3, June 21, 2014: AppleCare called me to "officially" confirm, sorta, that the issue was resolved, uh, was it? Yes, I replied. And when I asked if there was a particular reason why it happened in the first place, all they could say was that it was an issue on the server side.

June 5 2014 - 12:19 pm

NEW: Random Full Albums to Playlist

I saw this picture while browsing the other day:

Remember when the sides of multi-disc albums would be assigned based on how they would be stacked and flipped on the changer? A three-disc album would be sided as 1/6, 2/5, 3/4. With a changer you only had to get up once to flip "Woodstock" (Side 4 had Santana and Ten Years After, which made the effort worth it).

Anyway.

In the spirit of the venerable art of full-album listening, here's Random Full Albums to Playlist.

Launch it and it will ask you to enter the number of albums you want in the playlist. It will then assemble a totally random collection of albums to a "Some Random Albums" playlist. The playlist will be re-created on each launch, unless you choose to append additional random albums to an existing "Some Random Albums" playlist.

More information and download is here.

June 4 2014 - 1:39 pm

NEW: Track CPR

iTunes will let you re-associate a file with a single selected dead track.

This really is the safest way for iTunes to do this. The user approves a one-to-one correspondence with a user-selected track and a user-chosen file. If an error choosing the correct track/file pair is made, the user made it, not iTunes. Still, being able to point an album's or artist's worth of dead tracks at a folder of corresponding files seems like it would be a simple task, though in practice perhaps not always one-hundred percent fool-proof.

I've been putting off building something like that for a long time because of the fool-proof factor. It's restrictive and awkward to make a one-size-fits-all tool without including a lot of options to account for idiosyncratic ambiguities that ultimately may generate more support issues—to put it politely—than I would like to handle.

With compromise and limitations in mind, I'm posting Track CPR, a script that assists with batch re-associating files with dead tracks.

And, in the interest of avoiding as many support issues as possible it's somewhat narrowly focused; while this script will do a lot of the work for you, it can't make a lot of decisions for you. Therefore you may find it tedious.

But not as tedious as clicking the "Locate" button 200 times:

So here's how it works:
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June 2 2014 - 3:44 pm

UPDATED: Join Together v7.1.2

Join Together, my app that makes a single file from tracks dragged from iTunes or from files dragged from the Finder, has been updated to version 7.1.2. It fixes some memory issues that might cause a fail or crash while joining many large files in successive sessions and fixes a problem validating numeric input.

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