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UPDATED: CD Text to CD Info v5.0
It may be somewhat ironically serendipitous (or serendipitously ironic) that CD Text to CD Info v5.0 happens to be the first script I’ve posted specifically for the new Music app. Afterall, ripping audio from a CD seems quaint in the current age of streaming. But facetious jibes like “What’s a CD? LOL!” aside, there are still plenty of CDs in the world that haven’t been ripped yet and plenty of people who want to do the ripping. Thankfully, Apple has preserved this ability in the Music app.
CD Text to CD Info v5.0 will examine the selected CD mounted in Music for CD-Text and apply the album and track information to the CDs tracks. In this screenshot of the script’s main window, all of the information (except disc number/count and year, which I entered manually) is from the CD’s CD Text:
This is from a CD that I burned years ago in iTunes, which allowed me to include CD Text. Not all CDs contain CD Text, but many do. It would have solved a lot of metadata confusion if the music industry had insisted that CD Text be a mandatory Red Book standard from Day 1, but That’s The Way It Went.
As I mentioned at the top, CD Text to CD Info v5.0 will only run on macOS 10.15 Catalina with the Music app, which are both currently in beta (the version that works with iTunes is still available here).
NEW: Make Tags All Caps v1.0
I got a request from a DJ’ing Correspondent who had been manually changing some of his tags to all caps so they’d be easier to read on the decks under dim dance floor lights. (Are they still called “decks”?)
Anyway, to put a finer point on it, he sent me a snap of his handiwork:
Frankly, I don’t think I had ever seen this done. And it reminded me of these:
iTunes is, afterall, “jukebox” software. These are called title strips and are probably familiar to anyone who has ever seen a jukebox in a diner or the like. And for the most part the text was always all caps.
Manually changing the case of track tags in iTunes must have been painful.
Make Tags All Caps will change the text in your choice of the Name, Artist, Album, Comments and/or Composer tags of the selected iTunes tracks to ALL CAPS quickly.
More info and download is here.
UPDATED: Copy Rating Stars to Other Tag v1.1
The name of this script sort of looks like a word salad, now that I’ve enetered it as the title for this post. Oh well, it makes perfect sense.
A track’s rating property is actually a number value between 0 and 100. iTunes creates the rating stars in its interface by converting this value into graphical stars and half-stars: v div 20 = number of stars and if (v mod 20 = 10) then add half-star.
To the vexation of some iTunes users, a track’s rating value does not get written to its corresponding file’s metadata. So if you’re depending on a rating tag showing up in some other app in which you use your audio files (such as some DJs are) you have to figure out some other way of getting your iTunes track ratings to “travel” with your audio files.
An easy solution is to convert the rating value to Unicode text stars and dump it to some non-essential or lesser-used text tag—one that does get written to metadata by iTunes. And that’s what Copy Rating Stars to Other Tag does:
After running the script against a few tracks, copying the stars to the Composer tag, the metadata for the file should look something like this (as seen via Show Me The Metadata):
…and when the file is added or refreshed in another app, the text stars will display in that track’s Composer field.
Presumably, DJs don’t much care about Composer, Grouping and so on (title and artist, of course, and perhaps year and genre), so these tags may be available to accommodate ratings.
In fact, it was DJ’ing Correspondent who asked that I include Composer as an option in the initial version of Copy Rating Stars to Other Tag, and thus, this update.
Camelot Codes to Keys
For a brief time, back when I was radio DJ, a station I worked at experimented with using “key segues”, whereby a recorded sounder would transition from a song played in one key to a song in another. Thus: Song in C fades -> sounder transitions from C to A minor -> seg next Song in A minor.
It was horrendous.
Anyway. Since I was an Actual Musician (few and far between in radio), it was my job to assign the correct key for each song we played. Which essentially meant that I sat in a studio a couple of times a week with a CD player and a Casio keyboard and diddled around until I determined the key of each song we added that week.
Nowadays, a lot of DJs use the musical key of the tracks they play to create “harmonic mixes”; tracks are mixed or segued according to harmonic rules. Some DJs probably aren’t musically inclined either, so there is software and databases and such that can supply the key for their tracks. Then all they have to do is check the Camelot chart to see what might sound good.
(This, of course, is not perfect, since pitches can vary. Which is what made my old station’s experiments with key segues so cringey. We had CD players that could adjust for pitch, but nobody wanted to spend that much time on creating perfectly harmonic segues. But, whatever.)
I heard from a Correspondent who uses this system. He has the Camelot codes in his iTunes tracks’ Comments tags. These are codes that represent 24 musical keys and look like this: 1A, 2A, 3A…10B, 11B, 12B:
Courtesy of harmonic-mixing.com
He wants to convert the Camelot codes to the actual key. So here is a script that will do that: (more…)
UPDATED: Proper English Title Capitalization v3.6
Proper English Title Capitalization has been updated, primarily to provide compatibility with High Sierra. But I also added a Dry Run Log window to pre-flight the changes before actually affecting the tracks’ tags in iTunes.
Until now, I had logged this stuff to Console.app. Blech.
I also had a look at a problem with capitalizing words if they followed a colon (:). I think most conditions are covered. Essentially, if a word follows a colon, it’s capitalized no matter what.
Proper English Title Capitalization is free to use with a donate nag and thanks for your support! More information and download is on this page.
UPDATED: CD Text to CD Info v4.3
In our recent The Next Track episode where we discussed CD Text, I brought up the script CD Text to CD Info, which will grab the CD Text from a CD (if it uses CD Text) and apply the data to the appropriate CD tags. Then I thought: “Hmm, better have a look at that to make sure it still goes good.”
It does, but it occurred to me that I could tidy some things up. So this latest version removes a launch reminder about making sure the CD is sorted by play order; this is no longer necessary as the tracks are identified by their track number. I also added a “Export CD Text as XML” feature that will export the CD Text as a property list file. Probably not useful for most users but there it is.
This latest version is for OS X 10.10 and later only, free to use with a donate nag, and can be downloaded from this page.
UPDATED: Multi-Item Edit
Multi-Item Edit v5.0 has been updated to accommodate the new Dislike, Work and Movement tags that are available in iTunes 12.5, currently in beta.
Multi-Item Edit will allow you to edit most tags (and some additional options) of the selected track(s) in a single floating window using single-edit mode (one selected track) or multi-edit mode, which emulates the pre-iTunes 12 “multiple items” format; that is, a checkbox adjacent to each tag allows you to select which changes are to be applied to the selection’s tags.
As I mentioned above, this latest version adds new tags that will be available in iTunes 12.5; makes UI adjustments to accommodate those additions; removes the “Played” option (which tapped the AppleScript unplayed track property and which I’m not certain still performs a pertinent function anymore); includes minor maintenance and security fixes.
Multi-Item Edit is free to use for ten days and costs $1.99 thereafter.
UPDATED: Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks v5.0
I’ve updated Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks so it will work with the new Work, Movement and Dislike tags that are debuting in iTunes 12.5 and which are already available in the Developer and Public beta releases.
Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks will copy the text of the checkmarked tags from one set of selected tracks to a second set.
This latest version also consolidates Plays, Skips and associated date tags under a single checkbox. And because there seems to be some weirdness with retreiving Sort tags—the implicit text iTunes uses as gray placeholder text is recognized even if these tags are ostensibly blank—I’ve removed the option to copy them.
Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks v5.0 is free, with appreciative payment requested, and works on OS X 10.8 and later.
Copy Grouping to Work
As you probably know, the latest beta version of iTunes 12.5 includes Work and Movement track tags which Classical music listeners will appreciate. In many cases, you might want to use the text in the Grouping tag for the Work tag. While it might seem easy to just do a Multi-Edit on the tracks and copy-and-paste using the Get Info fields, you’d only be able to do this for individual batches of a single work at a time.
Here’s an AppleScript that will simply copy the Grouping tag to the Work tag for any number of selected tracks:
tell application "iTunes"
set sel to selection of front browser window
if sel is {} then return
repeat with aTrack in sel
try
tell aTrack to set work to (get grouping)
end try
end repeat
end tell
Save this named whatever you like to your [home]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder so that it will appear in the iTunes Script menu. Select some tracks and launch the script by selecting it from the Script menu. The text from the Grouping tag, even if it’s blank, will be copied to the Work tag of each selected track.
UPDATE: This script can be downloaded as part of the Work and Movement Scripts.
Revisiting Reset Plays
The iTunes faithful may remember that iTunes 12.4 removed the “Reset Plays” option. This command would zero the Plays and Skips of a track.
AppleScript to the rescue: I posted a script, Reset Plays, that replicated this feature and additionally deleted the Last Played Date and Last Skipped Date, turned off “Remember Playback Position”, and set the played property to false; essentially, rendering a track as “never played”.
Whether due to user clamor or by design, the “Reset Plays” feature was restored in iTunes 12.4.1 and I figured the script was obsolete.
Today, I got around to trying iTunes’ native “Reset Plays” in v12.4.3 (it is not something I would normally use at all). While the Plays and Skips are set to zero as expected, surprisingly, the Last Played Date and Last Skipped Date remain; such that a Smart Playlist filtering by the date a track was last played (or skipped) will not realise that these “reset” tracks were supposed to appear as never played.
So, Reset Plays may actually still be useful.