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30 Most Recent RSS FeedAssign Keyboard Shortcuts to Avoid Ambiguity
Correspondent David K. turned me on to this trick, which I had never seen before:
As you may know, you can assign Keyboard Shortcuts to application menu commands in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Conventionally, you would select the name of the app, the name of the menu command, and a keyboard shortcut combination in this preference tab. What I didn't know is that you can designate the precise menu heirarchy for a command by entering something like Top Menu->Submenu->Command, with "->" between each menu title, instead of just the name of the command.
The reason I want to do this in iTunes is that I'd like to set a shortcut for the "Songs" playlist view. But, because the word "Songs" is also in the Controls > Shuffle submenu, simply entering "Songs" in the keyboard shortcut panel would invariably toggle the Shuffle Songs option.
But by entering View->View As->Songs, the keyboard shortcut knows I mean that "Songs" and not the Controls > Shuffle > Songs.
Hoy!
Then I did the same for Playlist view:
The shortcuts also appear adjacent to the commands in their menu.
And an AppleScript could probably fire the shortcut via System Events.
UPDATE for The Music app: These instructions are pretty much the same except you will note that the names of the menu items in the View menu are "as Songs" and "as Playlist". Thus, use View->as Songs, View->as Playlist.
UPDATE for Ventura: As of macOS 13 Ventura, simply enter "as Songs" and "as Playlist".
Issue With Work and Movement Tag Text
(This post has been updated, see below.)
A Correspondent emaIed to point out that when text is entered in either the new Work or Movement Name tags and the text contains non-English characters they do not render correctly in Albums and Artists Views. Nor in the Info window:
So, watch out. This may be a display issue but I am not sure if Apple can fix it at their end or an update to iTunes is required.
UPDATE: FWIW, this is how it looks in the XML. Note that the Name tag is fine, but not the Movement tag:
UPDATE ALSO (September 16, 2016): This issue appears to have been resolved today after re-entering Work and Movement text.
UPDATE MORE (September 16, 2016): Spoke to soon. If the track is played then the NULL character returns. (Is that what that diamond-question mark character is called? Been a long time since I've seen it on webpages.)
UPDATED: Loved Playlists v1.2
Loved Playlists will enable you to view the Love/Dislike status for "loveable" iTunes playlists and batch-edit these settings for one or more playlists at a time.
Apple has not provided a means to see what playlists have been Loved/Disliked; you'd have to click the ellipsis menu ("...") or contextual menu (right-click anywhere in the playlist header) to see if Love is checkmarked or Dislike has a minus sign.
This latest version allows the Love/Dislike status of Playlist Folders to be changed. Pre-12.5.1 versions of iTunes had a bug that prevented this with AppleScript.
iTunes 12.5.1 Released
Apple released iTunes 12.5.1 today, no doubt to accommodate today's forthcoming release of iOS 10. Changes include an updated Apple Music interface; new Work and Movement tags, new Dislike tag. Most of these features had been available to beta users of iTunes 12.5. Additionally, some AppleScript bugs got fixed, including a problem programmatically setting the loved and disliked properties of folder playlist, the ambiguous Music/music bug for the special kind property (to do this, the music value for media kind was changed to song), and all media kind values appear to work correctly when changed with set.
More as it develops.
UPDATED: Multi-Item Edit
Multi-Item Edit v5.0 has been updated to accommodate the new Dislike, Work and Movement tags that are available in iTunes 12.5, currently in beta.
Multi-Item Edit will allow you to edit most tags (and some additional options) of the selected track(s) in a single floating window using single-edit mode (one selected track) or multi-edit mode, which emulates the pre-iTunes 12 "multiple items" format; that is, a checkbox adjacent to each tag allows you to select which changes are to be applied to the selection's tags.
As I mentioned above, this latest version adds new tags that will be available in iTunes 12.5; makes UI adjustments to accommodate those additions; removes the "Played" option (which tapped the AppleScript unplayed track property and which I'm not certain still performs a pertinent function anymore); includes minor maintenance and security fixes.
Multi-Item Edit is free to use for ten days and costs $1.99 thereafter.
UPDATED: Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks v5.0
I've updated Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks so it will work with the new Work, Movement and Dislike tags that are debuting in iTunes 12.5 and which are already available in the Developer and Public beta releases.
Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks will copy the text of the checkmarked tags from one set of selected tracks to a second set.
This latest version also consolidates Plays, Skips and associated date tags under a single checkbox. And because there seems to be some weirdness with retreiving Sort tags—the implicit text iTunes uses as gray placeholder text is recognized even if these tags are ostensibly blank—I've removed the option to copy them.
Copy Tag Info Tracks to Tracks v5.0 is free, with appreciative payment requested, and works on OS X 10.8 and later.
Copy Grouping to Work
As you probably know, the latest beta version of iTunes 12.5 includes Work and Movement track tags which Classical music listeners will appreciate. In many cases, you might want to use the text in the Grouping tag for the Work tag. While it might seem easy to just do a Multi-Edit on the tracks and copy-and-paste using the Get Info fields, you'd only be able to do this for individual batches of a single work at a time.
Here's an AppleScript that will simply copy the Grouping tag to the Work tag for any number of selected tracks:
tell application "iTunes"
set sel to selection of front browser window
if sel is {} then return
repeat with aTrack in sel
try
tell aTrack to set work to (get grouping)
end try
end repeat
end tell
Save this named whatever you like to your [home]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder so that it will appear in the iTunes Script menu. Select some tracks and launch the script by selecting it from the Script menu. The text from the Grouping tag, even if it's blank, will be copied to the Work tag of each selected track.
UPDATE: This script can be downloaded as part of the Work and Movement Scripts.
NEW: Loved Playlists v1.0
The only time you can see if a Playlist has been Loved is to view it in Playlist View, whereby a heart icon will appear in the upper right corner of the browser window. So here's an applet, Loved Playlists, that will list all the "loveable" playlists (plain, Smart and Folder) and display the appropriate icon (it will also accommodate the Dislike feature available in iTunes 12.5, currently in beta.):
As you probably have noticed, there is also an option to batch-edit these settings for one or more selected playlists.
Loved Playlists is free to download, with a donation requested. It is for OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) and later only.
