There sorta kinda is.

My first thought was to use AppleScript to just duplicate an existing playlist that already had the requisite view settings. (The duplicate command is typically used to copy a track from one playlist to another.) Unfortunately, when iTunes’ AppleScript duplicate command is used to copy a playlist it—bafflingly—creates a new untitled and empty playlist using the properties and views of the Music library playlist. Same as just creating a new playlist. That doesn’t seem right, does it? You’d think—well, I thought anyway—that using duplicate to copy a playlist would behave the same as the playlist contextual menu command “Duplicate” (control-click or right-click on the name of the playlist):

So, my next thought was…just use “Duplicate”. The playlist will be perfectly duplicated, column views and all, and selected in the Source list. Now you’ll have a new playlist named the same as the original with a “1″ at the end and which is populated with the original’s tracks (if it had any). You could create a bunch of playlists with columns set the various ways you like and then “Duplicate” them when you required one. Just rename the new duplicated playlist and delete any tracks. And that part can be automated.

The workflow, then, is to “Duplicate” a playlist manually with the contextual menu command and then run this script right afterwards:

The duplicatedPlaylist variable will be set to the currently selected playlist—as long as you haven’t clicked on something else this will be the one just created with “Duplicate”. The script then asks for a new name for the playlist, deletes any tracks from it, gives it the new name, and selects the re-named playlist. I’ve had the script reveal the Music playlist first so the Source list will scroll to the renamed playlist properly when reveal is subsequently called on it.

This routine works much slicker when you assign this script a keyboard shortcut. Then it’s only a matter of firing “Duplicate” with the cursor and then hitting the shortcut to fire the script. Bing-bang.

(I was too lazy to try and figure out if “Duplicate” can be scripted using GUI Scripting. If anyone can tell me about that I’d be obliged.)

I’m hoping that a future release of iTunes will allow the duplicate command to behave the same as “Duplicate”.

The latest version of Play Random Album actually chooses a random album name first which gives every album a fair chance. I’ve also speeded it up a little and tweaked some error checking. Attach it to a keyboard shortcut and it almost feels native.

I just bought a set of Bose 201 speakers and I’ve been burning ‘em in (ahem, letting them experience a variety of frequencies) by playing random albums using this script. Works great.

This latest version adds a routine that checks to see if iTunes is running before proceeding with updating the Podcasts. Now, you may be asking yourself: if I’m running the script from the iTunes Script menu then why would the script need to check if iTunes is already running? Because: I’m going to show you how to regularly launch the script automatically and invisibly in the background and you may not want iTunes to run when the script fires. If you’re not familiar with launchd then read on.

launchd is a system service that is built-in to the Mac OS. It is primarily used to run programs at startup. But it can also be configured to run jobs at various other times using launch agents (it replaces the deprecated cron which you may have heard of).

I’m not going to explain much about launchd—you can read more about it at Wikipedia or its man page. I’m just going to show you how to create and install the agent that runs a job to fire the Update Expired Podcasts script at startup and every eight hours thereafter. (You will need to restart or logout/login after creating the agent, so be prepared to do that.)

1) First, install the Update Expired Podcasts script in your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. (By default, the user Library folder is invisible in Lion. Option-click the Finder’s “Go” menu and choose “Library” from the drop down menu.

2) Launch your favorite text editor. TextEdit will do if you don’t have BBEdit, TextWrangler or something comparable. Copy the following into a new document (after some slight modifications this will be saved as the launchd agent):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Disabled</key>
	<false/>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>com.YOURUSERNAME.UpdatePodcastsAgent</string>
	<key>Program</key>
	<string>/usr/bin/osascript</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>osascript</string>
		<string>/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/iTunes/Scripts/Update Expired Podcasts.scptd</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
	<key>StartInterval</key>
	<integer>28800</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

If using TextEdit, click the “Format” menu and make sure that the document is plain text and not rich text.

3) Change the two occurences of “YOURUSERNAME” to, uhm, your user name. This is the same as the name of your Home folder.

4) Save the document as “com.YOURUSERNAME.UpdatePodcastsAgent.plist” (change that YOURUSERNAME again) in your [startupdisk]/Library/LaunchAgents/ folder. Note: this is the root-level public Library folder on the startup drive and not the user Library folder in your Home folder or the /System/Library/ folder! If there is no LaunchAgents folder there then create one and save the file in it. You will probably need to authenticate in order to save the file to this location.

5) Restart your computer, or logout and then login again so that your system registers the agent.

Yer done. Now, whenever you start your computer the Update Expired Podcasts script will run. It will also run every eight hours (every 28800 seconds) thereafter, thus making sure that your Podcasts are always updated.

Note that the script will check if iTunes is running and will quit if it isn’t. This is to prevent iTunes from launching when you least expect it. However, if you actually want iTunes to launch when the script is fired by launchd you can edit a single line in the script. Here’s how:

Navigate to the script in your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder and double-click its icon. This will open the script in AppleScript Editor. Locate this line:

Either delete this line or comment it out by placing a “#” at the front of it. Then “Save” the script and Quit AppleScript Editor.

Here’s the script:

tell application id "com.apple.iTunes"
	try
		set sel to selection
		if sel is {} then error
		set opt to (display dialog "Make new playlist from selected tracks named:" default answer ¬
			"" with title "Name New Playlist From Selection" with icon 1)
		set newName to (text returned of opt)
		if newName is "" then error
	on error
		return
	end try

	set newPlaylist to (make new playlist with properties {name:newName})
	repeat with t in sel
		try
			duplicate t to newPlaylist
		end try
	end repeat
	reveal newPlaylist
end tell

I named it “Name New Playlist from Selection”, saved it to ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ and gave it the shortcut using these instructions.

You know there is.

I put together this script which uses a combination of standard AppleScripting and GUI Scripting to emulate Josh’s shortcuts solution:

tell application "iTunes" to activate
tell application "System Events"
	key code 11 using command down
	tell application "iTunes" to reveal track 1 of (get view of front window)
	key code 0 using {command down, shift down}
	key code 11 using command down
end tell

Save this as whatever you like—I call it “Column Browser Go Home”—save it to the ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, and assign it a shortcut (make sure you have enabled GUI Scripting, too, as outlined in this article on using key codes). When launched after you’ve Column Browsed to a discrete set of tracks it will restore the entire list of tracks and jump to the top of the selected playlist. In my case this is usually the Music library playlist, but it will work with any playlist that’s being viewed with the Column Browser.

[UPDATE] And after all that, @tonyhazeldine tweets: “The same can be done by clicking on the column titles at the top of the column browser.” Yes, but each column has to be clicked.

But really. How many people ever want to do that? Well it turns out that the more I thought about how quirky a suggestion it was the more often I began noticing opportunities where I’d like to do the very thing. So I caved and wrote Play In Album Context.

If you select a track and then launch the script a new playlist will be created from the tracks of that track’s album (actually, tracks that have the same Artist, Album, and Disc Number tags—whether that results in gathering the correct tracks for the album depends on how well you’ve tagged your tracks) and the selected track will begin playing from its album position in the playlist.

If a track is playing and the script is launched, the album playlist is created as described above, and the current track will continue playing from its album position in the new playlist. The trick of the script is to temporarily set the playing track’s bookmarkable property, pause iTunes, and then immediately play the same track in the playlist; the track picks up playing from the bookmark set when the track was paused. There is a slight stutter when this transfer occurs, but if the goal is to hear the succeeding tracks in album context, it’s probably a small inconvenience to bear.

tell application "iTunes"
	activate
	-- select the Music library
	reveal (some playlist whose special kind is Music)
end tell
tell application "System Events"
	-- bring focus to Search box - Command-Option-F
	key code 3 using {command down, option down}
end tell

I’ve given it a keyboard shortcut of Command-Option-S.

More information on AppleScripting iTunes with key codes and keystrokes is here.

Works with importing selected CD tracks, too.

• Choose to delete and/or Trash the original tracks and/or files
• Copy all converted/imported tracks to a new playlist
• Optionally save AAC encoded tracks as M4B “bookmarkable” and re-add the converted files to the Books library

This latest version consolidates all options into a single window and displays progress during track processing.

Quick Convert v3.0 is for OS X 10.6 or 10.7 only. Previous universal version for PowerPC machines available at the entry page.

But ANYway.

Correspondent Dirk Scharff noted that “if used in the first 2-20 seconds of the song the skip counter is increased too and that’s somewhat undesirable as this wouldn’t happen if I played that song.” I don’t pay much attention to skips at my house, but he has a point. So Dirk submitted a mod to the script which I have incorporated below:

The two lines that contain the originalSkipCount variable are Dirk’s mod:

tell application "iTunes"
	if player state is not stopped then
		try
			set theTrack to current track
			tell theTrack
				set originalSkipCount to (get skipped count)
				set played count to (get played count) + 1
				set played date to (get current date)
			end tell
			next track
			set theTrack's skipped count to originalSkipCount
		end try
	end if
end tell

This will keep the skip count from increasing under any circumstance (when you run the script, that is; it doesn’t change iTunes’ default skip-counting behavior). If you prefer that the skip counter behave normally you can just comment out or delete the two lines with originalSkipCount.