iTunes 7.3 Available
As suspected, Apple has posted iTunes 7.3. Presumably it provides support for iPhone, but if there are any significant AppleScripting changes, I will post as soon as I can.
iTunes 7.3 Coming Friday?
This iPhone Tech Specs page at Apple indicates that iPhone requires iTunes 7.3 or better. So evidently not all the iPhone goodies are in iTunes 7.2.
Beta Testers Aplenty
Thanks for the great response to my call for beta testers yesterday. I've got a great pool of testers and, sorry to say, will be unable to accept any more.
Beta Testers Wanted
I'm looking for a few beta testers for a new application I'm working on. Potential testers must be Mac OS 10.4 or better/iTunes 6 or better users, have access to all privileges of computers on the local subnet (Moms/Dads with home networks are ideal), and must not be afraid of getting their hands dirty with some safe and minimal poking around in the computer. If you are interested, get in touch with me by email. My email address is around here somewhere.
NEW: Nudge Stream URL
Nudge Stream URL is a stay-open applet that will attempt to keep the currently playing radio stream active. If the stream drops out, or another track is selected, the applet will re-open the stream's URL.
FastScripts
I recently got an email nudge from developer Daniel Jalkut. He's the developer of the application FastScripts, among other things. He noticed that I provide instructions for setting keyboard shortcuts for iTunes scripts and thought I'd be interested in FastScripts. I admit that I have known about FastScripts for awhile but never got around to trying it out. Well, I finally did. FastScripts goes the Apple Scripts Menu one or three better. It supports keyboard shortcuts for AppleScripts in its menu (both application-specific and global) and has the nice effect of taking place as soon as you set a shortcut value (without having to re-start an application like you would have to do if you set shortcuts in Apple's Keyboard Preferences), and will also allow you to set shortcuts globally. FastScripts is shareware, but FastScripts Lite is free and will let you work with ten scripts. I highly recommend it.
iTunes Give and Take
Chris Breen discovers a Gotchya in iTunes 7.2: "If you burn a playlist of iTunes protected music to a CD in iTunes 7.2 and then rip that CD in the MP3 format (a trick people often use to remove the tracks? copy protection), those MP3 tracks won?t copy to an iPod. Try, and you?ll be told that the tracks are incompatible with the iPod." Those cheeky Apple devils!
Your ID Is Showing
My Good Friend Kirk McElhearn points out that your iTunes Account ID is accessible to any smarty who can open your iTunes Plus files. Derek DeLong extrapolates this phenomenon to suggest that if you P2P your iTunes Plus files Apple may be able to track you. Seems to me another sort of smarty could wipe any account info from the file anyway (along with any other purchase info) if one really wanted to nefariously P2P.
Locate .itc Artwork files
On the iTunes 7.2 info page, I've added a ham-handed script that will get the path to a selected track's .itc artwork file. It uses the persistent id properties of the current library and selected track to create the filename of the .itc file (eg: 855D16966D2635AE-E345A3A7AC7E50AF.itc), and UNIX find command to locate that file within the ~/Music/iTunes/Album Artwork folder. It then reveals the file in the Finder. Of course, more could be done with it, like converting to PNG or some such, more error checking, and so on. I've just been too busy to do much more with it ;)
iTunes 7.2 AppleScript Changes
I'll be posting any AppleScript changes I find in iTunes 7.2 on this page.