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30 Most Recent RSS FeedSegregate Shufflable Tracks
A Correspondent queries:
"Do you have a script that can create a playlist of songs if they have the "Skip when shuffling" attribute ticked in the info panel? The reason is because when I sync those songs to the iPhone that feature doesn't sync along with it so they play regardless. The feature works on the Mac, just not on the iPhone."
The shufflable property of a track does not have a corresponding Smart playlist criterion or Songs view column. So, looks like the only way to identify these tracks en masse is with AppleScript.
Interestingly, the shufflable property works somewhat backwards. If the "Skip when shuffling" checkbox is set (and a checkbox when checked has a "true" value) the corresponding shufflable property is set to false; that is, "not shufflable". This might be the opposite of what you'd expect. For instance, when "Remember playback position" is set to true with a checkmark, its correponding bookmarkable property is set set to true (yes, allow this track to be bookmarked). Just kind of interesting. A little. But its important to keep in mind when you want to detect the correct (and not opposite) value.
Anyway, here's a script that will copy any tracks in the Music library set to "skip when shuffling" to an existing playlist:
tell application "iTunes"
set targetPlaylist to playlist "Skip Shuffle Tracks"
set musicPlaylist to (some playlist whose special kind is Music)
set theTracks to every track of musicPlaylist whose shufflable is false
repeat with aTrack in theTracks
set db to database ID of aTrack
try
if not (exists (get some track of targetPlaylist whose database ID = db)) then error
on error
try
duplicate aTrack to targetPlaylist
end try
end try
end repeat
reveal targetPlaylist
end tell
Open this in Script Editor by clicking the little script icon. Save it named whatever you like as a Script Bundle in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder so that it will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. I have already created a playlist in iTunes named "Skip Shuffle Tracks" so make sure you do, too. if you want to use a playlist with a different name then you will have to hard-code that name in the script where I have used "Skip Shuffle Tracks".
Whenever you run the script it will get a list of track references from the Music playlist where each has its shufflable set to false. It will iterate over this list and for each track it will first see if the track already exists in the target playlist; and if it does not the track will be copied to the playlist.
The second try block around the duplicate command ensures that if any track cannot be copied, such as a "dead" track, the script will skip it without erroring.
