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30 Most Recent RSS FeedSite Stats and Lion Users
I was surprised when Tim Cook announced in the WWDC Keynote that 40% of Mac users are running Lion (OS X 10.7). For what its worth, here are my month-to-date Mac operating system unique visits (not pageviews) from Google Analytics:
Lion launched on July 20, 2011. Here are the same stats from July 27, 2011:
- 10.6 49.52%
- 10.7 41.37%
- 10.5 (Intel & PPC) 7.6%
I don't want to give the specific number of month-to-date uniques but for each stat it's over 50K.
iTunes 10.6.3 is Available
Apple has released iTunes 10.6.3—skipping a 10.6.2 release apparently—that has a number of bug fixes. More as it develops.
TrackSift and Smarts Updated at the Mac App Store
TrackSift v1.2.2 is up at the Mac App Store. TrackSift brings together nine fun and useful Tools for iTunes in one attractive, simple to install and easy to use app. Delete "dead" tracks, delete empty playlists, delete unwanted Genre names, locate tracks without artwork, without lyrics, or not in any playlist, and create one-hits, two-fers, and three-fers playlists. This latest version fixes a problem with the "Without Artwork" tool incorrectly reporting extant dead tracks and tweaks the "one-hits" tool algorithm. TrackSift is $1.99 at the Mac App Store.
Smarts v1.1.0 will save and store the criteria of an iTunes Smart Playlist — the smarts of a Smart Playlist — as a template so you can reload it into iTunes later. This version adds the ability to save a delete multiple selections and fixes a couple of minor bugs. Smarts is free and only available from the Mac App Store.
NEW: Export Files to Folder
There are some scripts here that export files to chosen locations. And of course, you can drag-and-drop selected tracks from iTunes to copy their associated files. But Correspondent Chris Updegrove inquired about a workflow to get MP3 files into a playlist-named folder on a flash drive for use in his car audio system. (I think that some MP3-CD players worked this way, too. I think I remember MP3-CDs.)
Export Files to Folder will export the files of the tracks in a selected playlist—or just the selected tracks in a playlist—to a new folder in a user-selected location; the folder will be created using the name of the selected playlist. Here I've used it to dump a bunch of playlists to a mounted flash drive:
Optionally, an activity log can be created on the Desktop that will list what was copied (or not copied and error messages).
It's a Cocoa-AppleScript applet so it can only run on OS X 10.6 or better.
UPDATED: Change Hidden iTunes Preferences v3.0
Thanks to a couple of recent posts at Mac OS X Hints and Cult of Mac, Change Hidden iTunes Preferences saw a lot of downloads in the past week or two. Unfortunately, I hadn't had time until today to give it an update. An older preference, "Show buttons horizontally", is no longer applicable and a new preference, "Disable 'elastic' scrolling behavior", applicable in Lion, needed to be added. These changes are in the latest version of Change Hidden iTunes Preferences.
Additionally, this version is written as a Cocoa-AppleScript applet and can only be run on OS X 10.6 or better.
Project: Gather Partially Played Tracks
I got an email from Correspondent Sherwood Botsford asking if there was any way to round up his partially played audiobooks. What he wanted to do was maintain a playlist of recently added audiobook tracks that he hadn't finished listening to and sync it to his iPhone. He'd gotten the recently added stuff okay by using a Smart Playlist. But Smart Playlists don't include any criteria for detecting how far along a track has been played, and Last Skipped may not necessarily have been set if a track was simply stopped rather than skipped.
If a track's "Remember playback position" setting in its Get Info's Options tab has been checkmarked—presumably, your audiobooks are "bookmarkable" by default or you have set the "remember" option manually—a track's bookmark property will contain the number of seconds the track had been played before it was stopped. Thus, if any tracks have a bookmark value greater than zero then they've been partially played.
So here's a script that will gather all those partially played tracks into a new playlist named "Partially Played" and that playlist can be the source for the Smart Playlist:
OS X 10.7.4 Quarantine Issue?
Two users have reported that after updating to Lion 10.7.4, downloaded script applets from this site would bounce in the Dock when launched and would not open. It turns out that the users had previously disabled the quarantine system. This normally alerts you when a new application or document has been downloaded from the internet as you are about to open it for the first time. For some reason this setting was not picked up in 10.7.4—or something—and logs an error like this to Console.app:
posix_spawn("path/to/the/app",...): Operation not permitted
Topher Kessler has an article at cnet (published before this 10.7.4 issue arose) that explains how the quarantine setting works and how you can reset it in order to get the downloaded apps running correctly.
UPDATED: This Tag That Tag v3.1
This Tag That Tag will assist with swapping, copying, and appending data between two user-chosen tags in selected tracks or tracks in the selected playlist:
Swap - swap data between tags, ex: ARTIST<->COMPOSER
Copy - copy data from one to another tag, ex: ARTIST->COMPOSER ARTIST
Append - append data from one tag to the end of another, ex: ARTIST->COMPOSER - ARTIST
Prepend - prepend data from one tag to the beginning of another, ex: ARTIST->ARTIST - COMPOSER
The latter three actions also provide an option to delete the info from the first tag after the copy.
This latest version allows numerical tag data to be copied (for example, the Year tag's data can be copied to the Comments tag).
UPDATED: Batch Export Playlists v1.1
Batch Export Playlists will export each selected plain, Smart, and Genius playlist as individual XML or M3U files to a user selected directory. Such files can be imported into iTunes again later.
This latest version correctly handles forward slashes in playlist names and has other minor code finesses.
The iTunes Guy Macworld Podcast
Kirk McElhearn is Macworld's "iTunes Guy" and he recently chatted with Senior Editor Chris Breen in a Macworld Podcast. Subjects include a variety of iTunes issues and a couple of scripts Kirk uses in his regular iTunes workflow.
