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Assistance with PDFs, iBooks and iTunes
Now that iOS 4 and iBooks allow you to sync PDFs to your iPhone you may be interested in using iTunes as a PDF manager. And if so, may I recommend PDF Adder. This set of scripts assist with adding PDF files to iTunes as "digital booklet" PDF tracks. Each provides a method for easily supplying Artist and Album tag data which is then applied to the newly-added PDF track:
- Add as PDF to iTunes is a PDF Service workflow that, when installed, will be available in the PDF pop-up menu of the Print Dialog. It allows you to save the current document as a PDF file (from any application that uses the Print Dialog) and add it to iTunes.
- PDF Adder is an applet that will let you choose an existing PDF file and add it to iTunes. It can be installed in iTunes' Scripts folder for easy access from iTunes Script menu.
- PDF Dropper is a droplet that lets you add a PDF file to iTunes by drag-and-drop.
The only thing these scripts can't do is change the track's "Media Kind" to "Book", which may be necessary in order for PDFs to sync to the iBooks app. (This is a limitation of iTunes' AppleScript architecture, not a limitation of the scripts.)
NEW: Report Real Play Time
Correspondent Jamie Shaw sent me a version of a script that calculates the play time of selected tracks or tracks in a playlist when the user-set Start and Stop times are also accounted for. In such cases, the total play time (for a playlist) would be shorter than what is displayed along the bottom of the playlist. I threw in a routine that lets you enter your Crossfade time (not really accessible programatically) and this is also part of the calculation. Report Real Play Time works especially nice when assigned a keyboard shortcut.
NEW: Delete Empty Playlists
You'd think just about every obvious iTunes housekeeping task imaginable would have been automated by now. You'd think. And so I thought also. Until I received a suggestion from Correspondent Holly B.:
"I am doing a major itunes library overhaul, and I used your batch playlist delete script, which was a huge improvement over the native iTunes one-at-a-time approach. I wanted to suggest a script that deletes empty playlists. I use smart playlists for management, and wouldn't want to delete empty ones, but I would want to delete empty non-smart playlists."
And it figures that it's also something I would use from time to time as well. So I whipped up Delete Empty Playlists. You can delete all empty playlists or select specific empty playlists to delete.
UPDATED: Track Number to Song Name Prefix v2.1
I discovered that I inadvertently left behind a bit of debugging code in the version I last posted so I removed it and have updated Track Number to Song Name Prefix to v2.1. This script will prefix the song name of each selected track with its corresponding track number (if it has one).
No More Mute
I just noticed that "Mute" has been removed from iTunes' contextual menu in the Dock as of iTunes v9.1. Man, that was handy. Of course, a script hooked up to a shortcut does the job:
tell application "iTunes" to set mute to (not mute)
I'm pretty sure there is no other on-board control to toggle mute otherwise.
iPad-Media Center Touch Control
So I saw the iDisplay that allows the iPad to be a second monitor to your desktop and thought: Perfect! This is exactly what I've been wanting to do with my Mac mini media center. I imagine I might even write an app or script that can reside in the second iPad monitor to control iTunes. I'll post later on how it works out.
UPDATED: Most Played Artists v2.0
I had to update Most Played Artists to v2.0. This is a script that generates a text file listing the total combined play count of tracks by each unique artist in your library, originally written by Michael Henley back in 2006. Apparently, as pointed out by Correspondent Juston R., it wasn't working so hot with Database Events. I also made some other minor fixes. Good to go!
Nine Years
Before I forget: February 15 is, apparently, the ninth anniversary of this site. As Regulars may know, the site began as a repository for AppleScripts written for SoundJam. (In fact, I still have SoundJam on my old iMac Rev B running OS 9 quite serviceably--if you think of that sort of thing as serviceable.) By February 15, 2001, Apple had released iTunes, but it wasn't 'scriptable until iTunes 2—as it was called—was released November 3, 2001. For a while I was posting both SoundJam and iTunes scripts. At the time no one was aware that SJ was doomed.
Anyway, thanks for all the visits and good words over the years. It's still a lot of fun.
Dave Taylor on Dupin
Dave Taylor is one of my favorite coding guys; he's got the know-how on everything from HTML to UNIX. So I was pretty bowled over to see Dave's take on Dupin v2.1 in a post on de-dupin' iTunes. Many thanks!
Dupin v2.1 Released
Dupin v2.1 is now available.
Dupin is your iTunes duplicates manager.
With Dupin you can:
- Very quickly find all sets of duplicate iTunes tracks based on your choice of criteria
- Select the "Keeper" tracks from among a number of duplicates automatically using a variety of versatile filtering options
- Consolidate the play, skip, and ratings information from all tracks in a Dupe Group to the single "Keeper" track
- Re-populate iTunes playlists replacing "non-Keeper" tracks with "Keeper" tracks
- Purge duplicate tracks from iTunes and send files to the Trash
- Manage intentionally duplicated tracks
- Copy tracks to new iTunes playlists
- View duplicates in non-loaded libraries created with iTunes' multiple library feature or iTunes Library Manager
- View duplicates in iTunes libraries on other machines on your local network
- Sort tracks and view track info
- Export a list of duplicates to a text file
- Locate tracks in the Finder and in iTunes
- Audition tracks
New in Dupin v2.1:
- runs under Snow Leopard or better only
- adds aproximate time matching for Time Criteria (settable to :01 ≤ n ≤ :10 seconds)
- adds File Path column to main table
- made task additions to contextual menus
- some warning dialogs now have suppression/reset options
- "Search" configurable with categories, re-located to toolbar
- other minor GUI improvements and alterations
- speed enhancements
- addresses toolbar customization issue
- addresses threading issue
- addresses memory leak issue
More information and download links are here.
