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Managing Track Info

June 5 2008 - 12:36 pm

NEW: Selected Tags to Lyrics

I never bother much with Lyrics, so I didn't realize Lyrics for the current track on the iPhone or iPod Touch could be made visible until Far-Flung Antipodes Correspondent Jon Jong queried about putting various tags into the Lyrics tag so they could be viewed instead.

Selected Tags to Lyrics will allow you to copy any combination of the Name, Artist, Album, Grouping, Composer, BPM, Comments and/or Description of the selected tracks to the Lyrics tag of each. Tap-tap, and there you are!

April 22 2008 - 1:46 pm

UPDATED: This Tag, That Tag Scripts v2.0

I've updated the This Tag, That Tag Scripts package to v2.0. These four scripts assist with swapping, copying, and appending data between two user-chosen tags in a batch of selected tracks. The latest version of each of the scripts now includes the "Show" tag, is saved as a script bundle (universal binary), and has general tidying of code.

March 10 2008 - 8:26 am

UPDATED: Make Video Tags v1.1

I was pleasantly enough surprised at the reaction to the initial version of Make Video Tags that I've updated it to include a couple of new features.

Click for larger image in new window

This is a no-big-frills video tagging app that I was using in my rip-dvds-for-iPod-with-Handbrake workflow. Added to the new version is the ability to open files in the Finder whereby they will be added to iTunes and then be available for editing in Make Video Tags. Also, if one or more iPods are detected to you can choose to send the tracks to a selected iPod.

This app handles editing of only the few video tags editable in iTunes itself. I highly recommend using the application Lostify, written by Lowell Stewart, for editing a lot more meta-data, including MPAA ratings, network, air dates, cast information, and so on.

February 27 2008 - 8:47 am

NEW: Make Video Tags

I just needed a quick and easy way to add global tags to some of my Handbrake'd DVD rips, so a few months ago I slapped together a simple GUI for some AppleScript routines to do the job. Notably, I used the routines from my Set Video Kind of Selected script. There are some great video tag editors available already (I frequently use and highly recommend Lostify), but I wanted something no-frills so I could just get a batch of stuff onto my iPod without a lot of keyboard pecking.

Well, I've cleaned it up and added some features and I'm making Make Video Tags available.

Click for larger image in new window

It grabs the track info from the selected video tracks in iTunes so you can edit it, then dumps it back to the appropriate tracks; global info on the left, individual track info on the right. Besides the tags pictured, you can also provide Comments, Description, Long Description, and Lyrics for each individual track. It's an AppleScript Studio application and requires OS 10.4 or better. Let me know how it runs at your house.

February 20 2008 - 1:09 pm

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.

September 6 2007 - 8:58 am

NEW: Album Rating Reset

Album Rating Reset will allow you to set the Album Rating for the album of the selected track to with full- and half-star ratings, or reset the Album Rating to its computed "clear-star" default rating. Requires iTunes 7.4.

August 14 2007 - 3:09 pm

DVD Housekeeping

Visitors who have been paying close attention to the latest AppleScripts posted here may have noticed a lot of DVD stuff going up. Well, I recently acquired a new DVD burner, a Sony DRX830UL/T. My Lacie d2 refused to burn any more DVDs. So far far, so good with the Sony. Anyway, I've been backing up all my TV Shows to data DVDs and naturally want to make the process as easy as possible:

  1. Go to the TV Shows playlist library and go into Browse mode. Select a Show and a Season.
  2. Make sure the tracks are sorted by Episode Number then Select All.
  3. Run the script Divvy Up For DVDs to create DVD-sized playlists using the selected tracks.
  4. Choose one of the new DVD-sized playlists and run the script Make Video PDF Booklet. This will create a PDF booklet with various info about each track and then add the PDF to the playlist.
  5. Burn the playlist (tracks and PDF) as a data DVD in iTunes. (Optionally, print the PDF to insert in the DVD case later. Paper...bah!)
  6. Have some sesame rice crackers and hummus. They're a great snack.
  7. When the DVD is cooked and mounted in iTunes, select it and run either CD Label of Selected Playlist (which uses AppleWorks) or Pages CD Label of Selected Playlist (which uses Pages) to create a sticky label for the DVD disc. (Sharpie...bah!)
  8. Optionally, return to the original playlist and use Print to make a DVD cover.
  9. Repeat for each DVD-sized playlist.

Then I smash the shows to make room for the upcoming new season's shows. We're big Season Pass users at my house.

August 10 2007 - 11:23 am

NEW: Track Names With Incremented Number v1.0

Probably misnamed, but coming up with a more descriptive title for Track Names With Incremented Number would have been a job. This script sets the Name of the selected tracks (or every track of a selected playlist) to a user-configured string using tag variables for the current name [name], track number [tn], episode number [en], episode ID [ep] and position in the selection order [#]. For example, a string such as "Desperate Housewives - Season 3/[en] - Episode [ep] - [name]" would render "Desperate Housewives - Season 3/5 - Episode 305 - Nice She Ain't", and so on. While it's great for TV Shows it could also prove handy for audiobook chapters and the like.

May 4 2007 - 7:31 pm

NEW: Number Song Names by Play Order

You know, there are probably four or five scripts here that attempt to number tracks or filenames the way people want. This has been an activity going back to SoundJam. Number Song Names by Play Order approaches the problem a little differently. The script will prefix each selected track's Song Name (I use the old "Song Name" nomenclature when actually the Song Name is now called "Name") with the number of its order in the selection (01, 02, 03...and so on). The selected tracks must be in a playlist that has been sorted by Play Order; ie, a user-created playlist, not a so-called "Master" playlist. The selection of tracks need not be contiguous, however it is important to have already established the Play Order. There's also an option to inhibit iTunes from renaming the tracks' filenames, since iTunes will automatically do that when you change a Song Name.

May 3 2007 - 4:06 pm

NEW: Get Airdate and Network

A Correspondent inquired whether the original airdate info for a TV Show track could somehow be obtained from the internet. While the IMDB offers this info, you can't really get at it so good with AppleScript, so I went with the--presumably--next best thing, which is IGN.com. Get Airdate and Network will use the show and episode names of a single selected TV Show track in iTunes to search the IGN.com website for that episode's page and then parse that page for the original airdate and network. You can then either open IGN.com's page for the episode or add the info to the selected TV Show's comment field. Note that results using this version are not one-hundred percent fruitful.

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