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30 Most Recent RSS FeedUPDATED: 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.
UPDATED: Just Play This One v3.0
I mentioned how easy it is to play a single selected track via AppleScript before. I've finally updated the perennial Just Play This One to use the easier syntax. It works great when you assign it a keyboard shortcut.
UPDATED: Rip A Few My Way v4.0
Import CD tracks with any encoder on-the-fly using Rip A Few My Way v4.0. After the rip, your preferences-set encoder (Import Settings) will be restored. Optionally copy the newly-ripped tracks to their own playlist.
This latest version correctly runs under iTunes v10 and better and includes maintenance fixes and finesses.
Server Issues
My apologies to visitors who were seeing errors earlier today. My hosting company was having some issues. The site should be OK now.
Get a Track Reference from a File Path
Correspondent Wayne B. recently wondered if there is a way to get a reference to a track in iTunes based on its file path. Well, unfortunately, you can't do something like this:
tell application "iTunes" set trackRef to (get some file track of library playlist 1 whose location is "some/file/path.ext") end tell
That will generate an error. But you can trick iTunes into giving you the track reference by using the add command--if you are certain the file is already in iTunes' database. When you add the file iTunes will check its database for the the corresponding library track for you and if it exists will give up the reference--and it won't re-add it:
set theFile to choose file -- or however you get the file path tell application "iTunes" try set trackRef to (add theFile as alias) tell trackRef log (get name) # and so on... end tell end try end tell
But remember that if the file isn't already in iTunes' database then iTunes will add the file as a matter of course, which may not be what you want. So this trick may work best only when you know a file is currently in your library.
You will not want to use the open command instead of add, because open will compel iTunes to play the file in addition to any add-housekeeping.
iTunes 10.1.1 Available
Looks like some minor fixes are available in iTunes 10.1.1.
