Join Together Breaks with Latest iTunes/QT

Haven’t had a chance to investigate this yet, but it appears that the latest iTunes and/or QuickTime doesn’t play well with Join Together. I’ll have a look-see as soon as I can and an update shortly thereafter.

iTunes 8.1.1 Released

Apple released iTunes 8.1.1 which enabled HD movie rentals and supplies some VoiceOver and syncing fixes.

The shortcut bug introduced in version 8.1–whereby scripts assigned keyboard shortcuts would run twice–appears fixed. Hooray!

iTunes AppleScript Keyboard Shortcuts Activate Twice

Correspondent Peter Kappesser noticed that under iTunes 8.1 AppleScripts to which he had assigned keyboard shortcuts (via the Keyboard Shortcuts tab in Keyboard & Mouse of System Preferences) would be activated twice when launched by the keyboard shortcut. Thus, they will perform their task twice in a row. I can verify it happens at my house, too. File a bug report.

Multiple Library Confusion

I’ve just posted a brief article explaining how your system can get confused when using iTunes’ multiple library feature:

Some of my AppleScripts for iTunes use a routine which reads the iApps.plist in order to obtain the location of the current iTunes library’s XML file in order to get information from it. I occasionally get reports that these scripts don’t seem to be working correctly; that the information seems to be wrong or doesn’t correlate with track tags in iTunes. When the Correspondent and I investigate this phenomenon, very often it is because the iApps.plist contains the wrong location for the current iTunes library….read more here.

It’s Official

I got a follow-up email to my bug report to Apple regarding the iTunes 7.7.1 “whose clause” to-do: “Engineering is no longer able to reproduce the issue with iTunes 8.” The iTunes guys put things back the way they were, more or less. An implied list (using “every” as the specifier or a range) returns a list or empty list, an implied single entity specifier (”first”, “last”, “some”, and so on) returns a bare value.

Genius 4010 Error

This Apple forums discussion post describes an error that many iTunes 8 users are getting:

“iTunes 8.0 gathers data about my music library well enough and sends it to Apple too; but then 10-15 seconds into ‘processing’ by Apple, iTunes stops and reports that ‘Genius results can’t be updated right now. An unknown error occurred (4010)’. I thought it might be overloaded servers and tried several more times in the hope of squeezing my request in between those of everyone else; but that didn’t work; plus if it were a server issue I’d expect to see postings here from others with the same problems, and I’m not.”

Several posters have tried removing dead tracks–tracks whose files cannot be located as designated with the encircled exclamation point–from the library using the script Super Remove Dead Tracks and trying again, and although this didn’t work for everybody, several posters did get things working correctly afterwards.

iTunes 8

Apple released iTunes 8 today at the “Let’s Rock” event.

Happily, the “whose clause” bug from v7.7.1 has been fixed: a filter using an implied plural (”every” or a range) will return a list and one that implies singularity (”first”, “last”, “some”) returns a bare item. As it should be.

More as it develops.

Some iPod-Related Updates

Correspondents had been recently reporting a common problem with several scripts that copy files to iPod where files would not be completely copied before their originals were removed; thus only a few tracks would get copied. I’ve fixed the issue (and I do not know for sure if it was caused by an iTunes problem or a Doug problem) and the scripts have been updated and posted.

Updates Coming

I am working on updating several scripts and apps to accommodate the iTunes 7.7.1 issue and I’ll be posting them when I can. Notably, Tracks Without Artwork to Playlist and Make Video Tags will be among the first to get fixed.

AppleScript Bug or Feature in iTunes 7.7.1

I think I have found a rather unusual AppleScript bug (or perhaps feature; one never knows) in iTunes 7.7.1. It affects several scripts that may need to reference a track using a persistent ID. When attempting to reference a single track with a whose clause, the track reference is returned coerced as a list. This requires that an additional step be taken to extricate the single item (the track reference) from the list. I have filed a bug report. It is reproducible with this script:

tell application "iTunes"
	set t to item 1 of selection
	set p to (get persistent ID of t)
	log ("p: " & p)
	set the_track to (some track of library playlist 1 whose persistent ID is p)
	-- the result is a list
	(*
		{file track id 33083 of library playlist id 10591 of source id 46}
		*)
	log the_track
end tell