dougscripts.com

September 3 2010 - 9:35 am

Gracenote Search MIA?

I've never known Gracenote (CDDB) to be down for maintenance, so it's unusual to see a 404 when going to the Gracenote search page. What's up with that?

September 2 2010 - 12:03 pm

iTunes 10 Breakage (Nothing Serious)

Some AppleScripts from this site use a routine that checks for the version of iTunes you are running. Some of the scripts that use these routines are broken under iTunes 10. So when running a script with iTunes 10.0 you may run into a dialog that erroneously reports something like "This script requires iTunes 6.0.2 or better". This is not a bug in iTunes, but a problem with the way the script does the version check. (Long story short: the version number once was a number, but more modern versions of apps use a string. Thus "10.0" is not necessarily greater than "9.2.1" and the routine fails to accommodate this.) You can edit/comment out the version check routine yourself or wait until I get around to fixing the handful or so scripts that are affected. In that case, let me know if you see the error.

September 2 2010 - 5:44 am

iTunes 10 Now Available

Apple released iTunes 10 yesterday, available from the iTunes download page and Software Update (it was about 8 hours between Steve Jobs' announcement and the release). iTunes 10 has a new look, an AirTunes reboot with AirPlay, and the new "Ping" social networking feature. As far as I can tell, current AppleScripts and apps from this site work as well as they always have on iTunes 10. I'll have more compatibility information if necessary after I check around with my iTunes Buddies.

August 28 2010 - 10:32 am

Add Pages ePubs to iTunes Automatically for iBooks Sync

The latest update to Pages.app allows docs to be exported in the ePub format. ePub is one of the formats that can be read by the iBooks app. Now, in order for documents to get onto your iPhone/iPad you have to add them to iTunes. By hand? No! Automatically with a Folder Action! Below is a script which you should save to your /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts folder. Attach the script as a folder action to a designated "ePub Export" folder, which you will create. Whenever you "Export..." a Pages doc to that "ePub Export" folder, it will automatically be added to iTunes' Books library and eventually sync to your iPhone/iPad.

If your iTunes is set to "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library", then you may want to delete the original from the "ePub Export" folder; just un-comment the (* *) section in the script by removing the (* and *) and saving the script.

on adding folder items to my_folder after receiving the_files
	repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the_files
		set this_file to (item i of the_files)
		tell application "Finder"
			if (get name extension of this_file) is not "epub" then return
		end tell
		tell application "iTunes"
			try
				add this_file
				
				(*
				-- if you have iTunes set to 
				--"Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
				-- then you might want to delete the original file...
				-- if so, remove comments from this block and 
				-- use the UNIX commands below to delete the file
				
				do shell script ("rm -f " & quoted form of  POSIX path of (this_file as text))
				
				*)
			end try
		end tell
	end repeat
end adding folder items to


More info on Folder Actions for iTunes is located here.

August 12 2010 - 10:37 am

NEW: Search Amazon Book Covers v1.0

Here's a pretty basic Search-Amazon-For-Art script. It grabs the name, artist, and genre tags from a single selected book-type track in iTunes and lets you choose which of those tags to use as keywords in a search for book cover artwork at Amazon Books. Search Amazon Book Covers currently pings the US Amazon site, but it can easily be mod'd to work with their other sites, or as the basis for a search of some other site.

July 25 2010 - 11:32 am

Re: Scripting Bug with iTunes 9.2.1?

Apple may be aware of the issue. This Discussions thread discusses the issue and RoyB suggests re-downloading and re-installing iTunes 9.2.1(5)—you may have 9.2.1(4)—as a solution. (Thanks Tom R.)

Update: I forgot to mention that Software Update will not report v9.2.1(5) as a newer version if you have 9.2.1(4). You must download iTunes from this page at Apple and install it from the disk image.

July 25 2010 - 8:28 am

Scripting Bug with iTunes 9.2.1?

I have received two reports over the past couple of days of some unusual behavior that occurs with iTunes 9.2.1 and some AppleScripts. After running a script that changes the track name tag, the track's Genre tag is replaced with a number in parentheses, eg, "(10)". In such cases, it appears that this is a number representing the specific Genre, such that Rock = 30, Jazz = 10, and so on. Like this:

Each report involved a different script which until now presented no problems. Experience suggests that this is not an issue with the scripts (since nothing about the script has changed) but with iTunes.

I have not seen this behavior myself, but I have not yet done any rigorous testing. Since I have only received two reports at this point my guess is that this may be a problem with something else and iTunes; a misconfigured plug-in or background app. But that may be wishful thinking and the problem may indeed just belong to iTunes.

If you have seen any behavior like this please let me know as soon as you can. I'd like as much information as possible before I test and eventually report this to Apple.

[UPDATE: see here for the fix.]

July 20 2010 - 8:51 am

PDF Adder and Safari Reader

I hadn't realized this until giving it a shot this morning, and I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere: I've been taking advantage of Safari Reader mostly for reading long form stuff (Esquire magazine has a lot of their classic articles on line, for example). For laughs, while the Reader window was open, I hit Safari's Print button to see if the Reader formatting is what gets recognized, rather than the original page. Perhaps not so surprisingly, it is!

Now it's a simple matter of using the "Add as PDF to iTunes" PDF Service in the PDF Adder collection to add the Reader-formatted page to iTunes' Books category and from there sync to iBooks. Of course, I've been PDFing stuff like this from Safari for awhile, but hadn't thought to try it with Safari Reader. Neat!

July 19 2010 - 7:42 pm

iTunes 9.2.1 Released

Apple has released iTunes 9.2.1 and it looks like there's a nice batch of fixes there. I won't have time to check tonight, but I'll report any AppleScript-related stuff as soon as I can.

July 16 2010 - 2:55 pm

Short URLs Added

For convenience I have provided a short URL for each script for easy bookmaring, link copying, Twitter posting, and what have you. So instead of having to copy (or even type) something like this:

https://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=removedeadsuper

...you only need this:

https://dougscripts.com/212

Gee, that's about half the length now that I see it like that.

The short URL can be found in the script's entry listed in the "Info" section. And the title of the entry is also a link using its short URL. The permalink for each entry is, of course, still viable, but I hope you'll use the short URL when possible.

Site contents © 2001 - 2025 (that's right: 2001) Doug Adams and weblished by Doug Adams. Contact support AT dougscripts DOT com. About.
All rights reserved. Privacy.
AppleScript, iTunes, iPod, iPad, and iPhone are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. This site has no direct affiliation with Apple, Inc.
The one who says "it cannot be done" should not be interrupting the one who is doing it.