If a track’s “Remember playback position” setting in its Get Info’s Options tab has been checkmarked—presumably, your audiobooks are “bookmarkable” by default or you have set the “remember” option manually—a track’s bookmark property will contain the number of seconds the track had been played before it was stopped. Thus, if any tracks have a bookmark value greater than zero then they’ve been partially played.

So here’s a script that will gather all those partially played tracks into a new playlist named “Partially Played” and that playlist can be the source for the Smart Playlist:

It will take a few seconds to run on a very large library. So I’ve provided an option to look at either all the tracks in the library or just those in the “Books” library and set the targetLibrary variable to this choice. Then, it will try to set the variable thePlaylist to a playlist named “Partially Played”. If it errors because the “Partially Played” playlist doesn’t exist yet it will set thePlaylist to a new “Partially Played” playlist. Then it will try to remove all the tracks in it (in order to update a previously rounded-up batch). Finally it will find all the tracks in the targetLibrary with a bookmark greater than 0 and copy them to the “Partially Played” playlist.

posix_spawn("path/to/the/app",...): Operation not permitted

Topher Kessler has an article at cnet (published before this 10.7.4 issue arose) that explains how the quarantine setting works and how you can reset it in order to get the downloaded apps running correctly.

This latest version allows numerical tag data to be copied (for example, the Year tag’s data can be copied to the Comments tag).

This latest version correctly handles forward slashes in playlist names and has other minor code finesses.

• Delete “dead” tracks, delete empty playlists, and delete unwanted Genre names
• Find songs without album art, without lyrics, and not in playlists
• Create “One-Hit Wonder”, “Two-Fer”, and “Three-Fer” playlists

New in version 1.2:

• New De-Genre tool replaces Podcasts tool
• Fixes issues with large libraries (50K+ tracks)
• Fixes issues with preliminary library scan
• Fixes issues with iTunes Match tracks
• Speeds-up no artwork tool
• Improvements to Delete Empty Playlists tool
• Improvements to Not In Playlist tool
• Improvements to One-Hit Wonders tool
• Minor GUI enhancements

Nine tools, one app—just $1.99 on the Mac App Store.

Many third-party music players and systems (Sonos, for example) may look for a “folder.jpg” here to use as display artwork.

This latest version is basically a maintenance update and is now a stay-open app that will float above iTunes while running.

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”.