Unfinished TV Shows

The TV Shows library can show you Watched shows and Unwatched shows. And how much time is left in shows you've started. But there's no way to sort these unfinished tracks or gather them all together, say, with a Smart playlist rule.

So here's a script that will find TV Show tracks that haven't been played all the way through and copies them to a new appropriately named playlist:

Open this in Script Editor by clicking the little little script icon above. Save it named whatever you like with the Format "Script" (.scpt) in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder so that it will be listed in the iTunes Script menu.

This script will need to be run manually every so often in order to refresh the playlist. Follow the instructions on this page to add a keyboard shortcut.

For Smarties: tracks in other libraries use the bookmark property (some by default) as well. Podcasts, Movies and Audiobooks can be sorted using a smilar script that targets those special kind libraries.

Segregate Shufflable Tracks

A Correspondent queries:

"Do you have a script that can create a playlist of songs if they have the "Skip when shuffling" attribute ticked in the info panel? The reason is because when I sync those songs to the iPhone that feature doesn't sync along with it so they play regardless. The feature works on the Mac, just not on the iPhone."

The shufflable property of a track does not have a corresponding Smart playlist criterion or Songs view column. So, looks like the only way to identify these tracks en masse is with AppleScript.

Interestingly, the shufflable property works somewhat backwards. If the "Skip when shuffling" checkbox is set (and a checkbox when checked has a "true" value) the corresponding shufflable property is set to false; that is, "not shufflable". This might be the opposite of what you'd expect. For instance, when "Remember playback position" is set to true with a checkmark, its correponding bookmarkable property is set set to true (yes, allow this track to be bookmarked). Just kind of interesting. A little. But its important to keep in mind when you want to detect the correct (and not opposite) value.

Anyway, here's a script that will copy any tracks in the Music library set to "skip when shuffling" to an existing playlist:

Open this in Script Editor by clicking the little script icon. Save it named whatever you like as a Script Bundle in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder so that it will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. I have already created a playlist in iTunes named "Skip Shuffle Tracks" so make sure you do, too. if you want to use a playlist with a different name then you will have to hard-code that name in the script where I have used "Skip Shuffle Tracks".

Whenever you run the script it will get a list of track references from the Music playlist where each has its shufflable set to false. It will iterate over this list and for each track it will first see if the track already exists in the target playlist; and if it does not the track will be copied to the playlist.

The second try block around the duplicate command ensures that if any track cannot be copied, such as a "dead" track, the script will skip it without erroring.