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NEW: Search CD Universe for Album
My friend Kirk McElhearn has a very fine article at Macworld on working with album artwork: where to get it, how to get it, and so on. He mentions that the CD Universe website is a good place to snag album artwork and so I thought I'd slap together a quick script to search the site. Search CD Universe for Album will use the album tag of the selected iTunes track as the basis for a "Title" search at CD Universe. You'll have to manually navigate the site once the search results page comes up, but at least the script gets you started.
UPDATED: CDDB Safari Kit v2.4.1
Gracenote has recently updated its page format thus obliging me to update CDDB Safari Kit to version 2.4.1. If you are interested, they are using more CSS and have stopped using list tags for track names and numbers.
CBR and All That
OK, so we know that unchecking AAC VBR in Preferences > Advanced > Importing actually gives you ABR (Average Bit Rate) encoding and checking it gives you VBR_Constrained. I just put up a script that uses afconvert to import CD tracks as old-style CBR (Constant Bit Rate). However, even this apparently does not provide a constant bit rate. For example, after ripping a few tracks with it and attempting to join and export them in QuickTime, I do not get the pass through option. Checking their info with the QT Inspector the bit rates are indeed slightly different. Here's what's weird: CD tracks I ripped with a pre-v7.5 iTunes without VBR also have slightly different bit rates, but QT allows the export as pass through. I've gotta do some research.
UPDATED: Search SlothRadio for Artwork v1.1
Search SlothRadio for Artwork v1.1 uses the Artist and Album name of the selected or currently playing track in iTunes to initiate a search for corresponding cover artwork using SlothRadio's Cover Finder. They recently changed their web page format and so the script has been updated. Thanks to Correspondent Jostein Sletvold for the info.
UPDATED: CDDB Safari Kit v2.3.3
CDDB Safari Kit had to be updated because Gracenote mooked with their template. These two AppleScripts, "CDDB Safari" and "CDDB Tracks to iTunes via Safari", assist in finding and retrieving Album track information, Album, Artist, and Year from Gracenote's CDDB website using Apple's Safari browser.
NEW: Scour Web Page for Media v0.5
Scour Web Page for Media will examine the current web page in Safari for your choice of media files, such as those on a MP3 blog (currently mp3, aac, and pdf files are supported), and allow you to select any found files to download and then add them to iTunes. Options include selecting download location, adding to a particular iTunes playlist, and the ability to delete the original files after adding to iTunes.
UPDATED: Current Track to Twitter v1.5
Whew! Quick update to Current Track to Twitter, which was NEW this morning (see previous entry). Rather than have you hard code the script, you can now create a new password in your Keychain with your Twitter account info, thus keeping it secure. You'll have to set up a new password with the Keychain Access app and instructions are included in the script's Read Me. Much obliged to Coda Hale's original script for QuickSilver which provided some routines.
NEW: Current Track to Twitter v1.0
If you're a Twitter user, Current Track to Twitter is a stay-open applet that continuously monitors iTunes and when a new song starts playing will post info about that song to your Twitter account, including song name, artist, album, and rating stars. Geeky!
PDF Booklet via Safari
I've been messing with Wikipedia to get info for various artists (see Search Wikipedia). But I wanted to be able to save the info, perhaps even including it in iTunes for future reference. Can do. Today I tried this trick: use Safari to go to the Wikipedia page containing info on your favorite artist. Click "Print" in Safari's File menu and then click "Save as PDF" in the PDF drop-down. Optionally, hit the "Preview" button in the Print dialog to see what the PDF will eventually look like after it's saved and then save it as a PDF.
Once the PDF has been saved, use PDF Adder to add it to iTunes. The "PDF Adder" script in that collection will let you choose an existing PDF file and add it to iTunes and provide Album and Artist tags to the new PDF so that it will be sorted with the associated Album. If your iTunes Advanced>General Preferences is set to "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" the PDF will be copied to your iTunes Music Library folder, and the original PDF can be Trashed.
As far as Wikipedia goes, it appears they use a "print.css" file that fomats the page for printing. This maintains formatting while eliminating the sidebars and such. Other sites may do so as well--like the one you're looking at now ;).
I Like PandoraBoy
As I've noted in a previous entry, I've been digging Pandora, the music discovery site. Normally, you have to run it from your web browser. I got tired of trying to remember to keep a Safari window to keep the stream going so I used a dedicated browser, Shiira, just to run it. Well, turns out there's a nice little app that uses Webkit to display Pandora called PandoraBoy from FrozenSilicon Labs. PLUS, it's AppleScriptable so you can assign hotkeys to control volume and skipping and thumbs ups/downs. It can also interface with Growl. And PandoraBoy is free. Can't beat that with a bat.
Wonder if they'd add an AppleScript feature so I could grab currently playing track info? Gotta drop 'em a line.
