Track Down Purchases v2.0 will examine each track in your entire iTunes library—or a selection of tracks—for items purchased from the iTunes Store (audio, video, and books) and then sort them by either the purchaser’s name (the “Purchased by” entry in a track’s Get Info Summary tab) or account (”Account Name”) into discrete playlists.

This latest version is written as a Cocoa-AppleScript applet for OS 10.6 or 10.7 only, adds the ability to sort by account name, and provides a progress indicator. (My thanks to Correspondent Andrew Wynn Rouse for inventing the account name search portion.)

This latest version is written as a Cocoa-AppleScript Applet and can only run in OS X 10.6 or 10.7. As you can see from the pic above, it consolidates all settings into a single window and provides an example that is updated as the settings are changed. Text between the arrows would be removed.

tell application "iTunes"
	set trackRef  to (get some file track of library playlist 1 whose location is "some/file/path.ext")
end tell

That will generate an error. But you can trick iTunes into giving you the track reference by using the add command–if you are certain the file is already in iTunes’ database. When you add the file iTunes will check its database for the the corresponding library track for you and if it exists will give up the reference–and it won’t re-add it:

set theFile to choose file
-- or however you get the file path

tell application "iTunes"
	try
		set trackRef to (add theFile as alias)
		tell trackRef
			log (get name)
			# and so on...
		end tell
	end try
end tell

But remember that if the file isn’t already in iTunes’ database then iTunes will add the file as a matter of course, which may not be what you want. So this trick may work best only when you know a file is currently in your library.

You will not want to use the open command instead of add, because open will compel iTunes to play the file in addition to any add-housekeeping.

I used Change Hidden iTunes Preferences to toggle the visibility of the “Library” library playlist. In the pic below it is listed atop the other library playlists. In the old days, this was the main library playlist and listed everything in the library. Well, it still does. When the “Library” is available, you can use the Column Browser to access an entire Album, which will include any associated booklet (providing the Artist/Album tags correspond correctly):

(The yellow highlight over the booklet is an artistic representation.)

• Assimilate View Options
• Batch-Delete Playlists
• Block Party!
• Compare Two Playlists
• Export Smart Playlist Criteria
• Move Playlists to Folder
• Selected Playlists To iPod

These seem to be the most popular scripts that are affected by the “none/all” issue introduced in iTunes 8.2. There may be a few others, but I haven’t gotten email feedback on those nor have I run across a problem with any other scripts I use regularly. But if you ever get a error like this:

…then let me know.

tell application "iTunes"
	if selection is {} then return
	set strm to (item 1 of selection)
	if (get class of strm) is not URL track then return
	repeat
		try
			play strm
			exit repeat
		on error m number n
			delay 15
		end try
	end repeat
end tell

The earlier script used the open location command, errors from which could not be defeated with the try block.