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30 Most Recent RSS FeedNEW: A Space Between v1.0
iTunes has had the Crossfade feature for a while, whereby consecutive songs will overlap for a few seconds at end-to-beginning. But what if you want the opposite effect: a set amount of silence between each song? But you can't set a negative Crossfade. A Space Between is an AppleScript applet that will wait a user-set number of seconds between plays of consecutive tracks in a playlist. Just select a playlist, or a track in a playlist, launch the applet, and enter a number of seconds.
The tracks will play, pausing for the entered number of seconds between each track.
Ten Years
February 15th is the anniversary date of this site and this year makes ten anniversaries. Wow, huh? Actually, I had some stuff up slightly earlier than that, but I can't Wayback much of it and the original files are probably on a Zip disc or something. Closet > Back of Closet > Milk Crate > Shoebox > Zip Discs. Like I'm going back there to even look, right?
Thanks for visiting and making it a lot of fun. I use iTunes with AppleScripts everyday and can't believe how geeked-out I still am about it.
Spins v1.0.3
I've updated Spins to v1.0.3. Spins examines your iTunes library and displays stats about your most played tracks. Left to right, its "Breakouts" window, main window displaying one of four panels, and "Live Spins" floating display:
This latest version fixes an issue configuring hours for display, changes how the total tracks of the same rank are displayed in the Live Spins window, and makes some enhancements for stability. Spins is $10 shareware but the un-registered demo is free to use with limited features. Version 1.0.3 is a free update for registered users.
Create Shortcut Keys to Select Libraries
There are no shortcut keys to select the Music, Podcast, TV Shows, and other libraries. But you can use AppleScript to create some. Here's how:
NEW: Restore Artwork from Album Folder
Restore Artwork from Album Folder will look for an image file in the parent folder of each selected track's file--presumably its "Album" folder--and apply the data from that image file as artwork for the track. If more than one image file is found in the target folder than the first one found will be used. I didn't include a preferences pane as I did for Save Album Art to Album Folder, but you can hard-code the kind of image file to look for, JPEG or PNG, in the script.
UPDATED: Save Album Art to Album Folder v3.0
The script Save Album Art to Album Folder will export the display artwork of each selected track as an image file to the folder which contains each selected track's file—presumably the track's Album folder—or a single user-selected folder. The script will try to ensure that only one copy of an album's artwork is exported to the folder if multiple album tracks are selected.
This newest version provides a special Preference pane that enables additional sips image processing options to be set:
This can be accessed by pressing and holding the keyboard's Option key while launching the script from iTunes' Scripts menu.
All Those Audio Formats
Via Lifehacker, this How-To Geek article is a great primer on the differences among digital audio formats.
iTunes Keyboard Shortcuts
How many items on Kirk's list of Essential iTunes Keyboard Shortcuts have you committed to memory?
Fix a iOS Sorting Anomaly
Correspondent Roy Gatsby brought this GigaOM article to my attention which discusses a supposed bug in the latest iOS regarding the sorting of TV Shows on iOS devices. Apparently, non-iTunes Store TV Show episodes may not sort correctly if the Artist is not also the Show name. The recommended fix, therefore, is to open up a track's Get Info window and manually copy the Show tag text and paste it to the Artist tag.
Wait. Manually?
I recommend using the "Put This in That" script from the This Tag, That Tag Scripts collection. It will allow you to copy Show to Artist on a batch of selected tracks.
By the way, changing the Artist tag does not compel iTunes to change the location of the TV Show file since iTunes does not organize TV Shows in the iTunes Media folder by the Artist tag as it does with Music files.
Skip Back or Ahead Custom Mods
Recently, I was watching a DVR of a football game I had made with EyeTV. In general, I prefer to skip the parts that aren't showing football players playing football. So, while watching the game on iTunes I used the script Skip Back or Ahead to jump ahead 120 seconds when necessary.
The thing about that script is that I didn't exactly streamline the workflow. Here are the steps required to skip ahead 120 seconds:
- Click the iTunes Scripts menu, scroll, and click the script's name to launch the script
- Enter the number of seconds in the dialog that appears--in this case the three digits "1-2-0"
- Click the "Ahead" button to dismiss the dialog
...and then the playing iTunes track, my football game, advances two minutes. But although it looks like just three quick steps it seems to take about a half an hour to perform. OK, not a half an hour. But it does seem kinda clunky to have to do a lot of mousing and key pressing just to perform a simple task like skipping ahead.
Here's what you can do to streamline the script at your house.
