dougscripts.com

January 2024

December 30 2015 - 7:48 am

EPPC and AirPlay Bug?

A Correspondent alerted me to an issue he is seeing, and that I can verify, using the EPPC protocol to access the AirPlay device property via iTunes on a remote machine. For example, with Remote Apple Events enabled on a remote machine, a script like this—that up until recently worked—will fail:

tell application "iTunes" of machine "eppc://user:password@Remote-Machine.local"

set apDevices to (get name of every AirPlay device)

end tell

In this example, you would expect to get a list of the names of the AirPlay devices available on the remote machine. But instead, the script trips up on the word "AirPlay" with the error "Expected class name but found identifier". "AirPlay device" is a class name. Other conventional iTunes/Remote Apple Events routines work as expected.

Our Correspondent reports that this sort of script worked happily in the past; sounds like he uses it to control iTunes like a server on the remote machine. There have been EPPC-related bugs in the past that were introduced with Security Updates so I'm hoping this is one of those sorts of things and not a deliberate "security feature". File a bug if you can.

December 11 2015 - 4:27 pm

iTunes 12.3.2 Available

Apple has updated iTunes to 12.3.2 with improvements to browsing works, performers and composers for Classical tracks in Apple Music. More as it develops.

December 3 2015 - 3:57 pm

Track Numbers in the Thousands

A Correspondent who uses my applet Multi-Item Edit to enter five-digit track numbers has reported that iTunes now formats these numbers with a comma; for example, 16789 becomes 16,789. iTunes itself will only allow three digits to be entered in the Get Info track number field, so it is unlikely that most users would ever encounter this. According to my Correspondent, this is a relatively recent iTunes behavior.

It's not like track numbers are "counting numbers". They're more like digits. Is that the arithmetical name for that sort of thing?

Multi-Item Edit is able to enter more than three digits because the AppleScript track number property accepts integers and I guess nobody ever thought of limiting the input to less than 1000.

Interestingly, track numbers used to only go to 99 because that was the Red Book-limited number of audio tracks allowed on a CD. Thus the original ID3 Tag spec only allowed two digits for track numbers. Because, the thinking at the time went, why would there ever be a need for more? Although I recall that you could "fake" more tracks using CD track indexes. I'm not sure what the spec is now since there's no such thing as audio files anymore. (Just kidding. Been reading too many tech articles on streaming lately.)

I'm going to file the comma issue as a bug just to be ticky-tacky about it, but—also interestingly—the episode number tag does not use comma formatting and it also only accepts integers, at least as far as AppleScript is concerned (you can see the track row at the top of this screenshot):

As I mentioned, it's unlikely most people would ever notice this, but you might if you were taking advantage of this greater-than-999 kludge with AppleScript.

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