NEW: Artist - Album - Disc from Selected Track
Artist - Album - Disc from Selected Track creates a new playlist--with the intention of burning its tracks to a CD--based on a single selected track's artist, album, and disc number. The tracks are ordered by album track number. There are other things to consider as well, so be sure to read the docs.
Sides
So I purchased "More Songs About Buildings And Food" by Talking Heads from the iTS today. This is an album we listened to in the dorm as An Actual vinyl LP back in 1978. I was reminded that "Found A Job" (track 6 of 11) has a long fade. This is because it was the last track on Side 1 of the original LP. Back in the day, the least-high person would run to the phonograph and flip the LP over. Then we'd all get ready for the anxious opening of "Artists Only"--and arguably the darker Side of the LP. Oh well. No one would never know now. Why not? How can we figure this out? How can we denote the Sides of an original LP which--no doubt--were mastered based on start/end of LP sides?
NEW: Number Song Names by Play Order
You know, there are probably four or five scripts here that attempt to number tracks or filenames the way people want. This has been an activity going back to SoundJam. Number Song Names by Play Order approaches the problem a little differently. The script will prefix each selected track's Song Name (I use the old "Song Name" nomenclature when actually the Song Name is now called "Name") with the number of its order in the selection (01, 02, 03...and so on). The selected tracks must be in a playlist that has been sorted by Play Order; ie, a user-created playlist, not a so-called "Master" playlist. The selection of tracks need not be contiguous, however it is important to have already established the Play Order. There's also an option to inhibit iTunes from renaming the tracks' filenames, since iTunes will automatically do that when you change a Song Name.
NEW: Get Airdate and Network
A Correspondent inquired whether the original airdate info for a TV Show track could somehow be obtained from the internet. While the IMDB offers this info, you can't really get at it so good with AppleScript, so I went with the--presumably--next best thing, which is IGN.com. Get Airdate and Network will use the show and episode names of a single selected TV Show track in iTunes to search the IGN.com website for that episode's page and then parse that page for the original airdate and network. You can then either open IGN.com's page for the episode or add the info to the selected TV Show's comment field. Note that results using this version are not one-hundred percent fruitful.
UPDATED: De-Genre v2.0
Eliminate superfluous Genre names fast with De-Genre v2.0. This script re-assigns the Library tracks of selected Genres to another Genre so that the original--and consequently un-assigned--Genres disappear from iTunes' Genre pop-up list. As you may know, you can make many superfluous Genres vanish from iTunes' Genres pop-up list simply by eliminating a reference to them in your tracks; when no tracks are assigned to a particular Genre, that Genre will be dropped from the list. (iTunes original Genre names cannot be removed this way; only those accumulated from other sources or created by you.)
UPDATED: Find Album Artwork with Google v2.5
Brett O'Connor's popular Find Album Artwork with Google has been updated to 2.5. This script will do a Google search for artwork based on the selected track's Album. This latest version updates image size settings to be in-line with Google Image's redesign and fixes a problem with an ampersand character breaking the search string.
Google Reader Problems
Several people who use Google Reader to view my RSS feeds had complained that links embedded in articles were not rendering correctly. I think I have fixed this. Google Reader is not as forgiving as some other new readers so I had to be much more particular about how certain characters were translated. If you use Google Reader, try deleting and then re-adding my feed links and let me know if you get the same nice results I do.
MPAA Ratings
Several people have asked me if it is possible to add or change the MPAA ratings of TV Shows and Movies via AppleScript. From what I gather, the simple answer is no. As far as AppleScript goes, there is no such thing as a "MPAA rating" property which can be directly accessed. As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent a lot of time investigating this), video files downloaded from the iTunes Store contain the MPAA data. For instance, my "Daily Show" video files contain some info that looks like this: "us-tv|tv-14|500|". This can also be seen in the XML file in the Content Rating node--remember that the XML file is written out by iTunes, not read in by iTunes, so changing the XML file does nothing. I actually opened one of video these files in TextEdit, changed the "tv-14" of this string to "tv-ma", and after saving the file, "TV-MA" appeared in the Track Name of the show. It took quite a while, but I'm sure a perl routine could do it faster. But be that as it may, I am not sure how to add an MPAA rating to a file which you may have gotten by some means. I am aware that the program Losify (which I recommend!) is able to do it, but the file does need to be re-written.
Make sure iTunes mounts a networked music library - Mac OS X Hints
This tip at Mac OS X Hints, Make sure iTunes mounts a networked music library, provides a simple method to ensure that the network drive containing your iTunes Music folder is mounted when starting iTunes. Simply put an alias of the iTunes app on the networked drive, copy that alias to your Dock, and launch iTunes with that.
NEW: Trackographer v1.0
Trackographer is a Stay-Open applet that will monitor iTunes and send tag information from each playing track (including radio streams if they provide track info) to a text file. Preferences can be set to include or not include various basic tags and to create a plain text file or a tab-delimited text file which can be imported into a spreadsheet.
