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Managing Track Info

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.

April 30 2007 - 9:07 am

UPDATED: De-Genre v2.0

Eliminate superfluous Genre names fast with De-Genre v2.0. This script re-assigns the Library tracks of selected Genres to another Genre so that the original--and consequently un-assigned--Genres disappear from iTunes' Genre pop-up list. As you may know, you can make many superfluous Genres vanish from iTunes' Genres pop-up list simply by eliminating a reference to them in your tracks; when no tracks are assigned to a particular Genre, that Genre will be dropped from the list. (iTunes original Genre names cannot be removed this way; only those accumulated from other sources or created by you.)

April 6 2007 - 9:46 am

NEW: Search Artists to Make Sort Artist

This script doesn't do anything you couldn't already do manually, but does put the whole process into a single script. Search Artists to Make Sort Artist will search for tracks whose Artist tag contains a user-entered search string. It will then ask you for a text string to use in each of those tracks' Sort Artist Tag. Or, rather than have the script automatically enter a Sort Artist, you can choose to display the results of the search in a new playlist to inspect them, then use Batch Set Tracks Sorting Tags to set the Sort Artist tag of just the selected tracks. FWIW.

March 26 2007 - 3:29 pm

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.

March 6 2007 - 8:40 am

NEW: Batch Set Tracks Sorting Tags

I don't know who doped my corn flakes yesterday, but after iTunes 7.1 came out I'd swear the dictionary didn't show the new sorting tags. Well, things have gotten back to normal here and I've got Batch Set Tracks Sorting Tags for you. This script will allow you to batch-set the new sorting tags ("Sort Name", "Sort Artist", "Sort Album Artist", "Sort Album", "Sort Composer", "Sort Show") of the selected tracks, rather than manually doing so one track at a time.

February 2 2007 - 12:25 pm

UPDATED: Copy To Lyrics (Service) v1.1

A quick update to Copy To Lyrics (Service) adds display alerts to appear when appropriate. This Service menu service copies selected text from any application to a selected iTunes track's Lyrics tab. It was created from an AppleScript using ThisService. And BTW, I want to thank ThisService developer Jasper for helping me out with a few questions on how ThisService works.

February 1 2007 - 10:02 am

NEW: Copy To Lyrics (Service)

I have been hearing some buzz about Waffle Software's ThisService application which will create and install services based on virtually any command-line script or AppleScript. So I thought I'd give it a shot. Copy To Lyrics (Service) is a service that will copy the selected text from an application to a single selected iTunes track's Lyrics tab. I just did it for fun, really, but it might save some lyric-gathering obsessives a few keystrokes.

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