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30 Most Recent RSS FeediTunes 12.3.2 Available
Apple has updated iTunes to 12.3.2 with improvements to browsing works, performers and composers for Classical tracks in Apple Music. More as it develops.
Track Numbers in the Thousands
A Correspondent who uses my applet Multi-Item Edit to enter five-digit track numbers has reported that iTunes now formats these numbers with a comma; for example, 16789 becomes 16,789. iTunes itself will only allow three digits to be entered in the Get Info track number field, so it is unlikely that most users would ever encounter this. According to my Correspondent, this is a relatively recent iTunes behavior.
It's not like track numbers are "counting numbers". They're more like digits. Is that the arithmetical name for that sort of thing?
Multi-Item Edit is able to enter more than three digits because the AppleScript track number property accepts integers and I guess nobody ever thought of limiting the input to less than 1000.
Interestingly, track numbers used to only go to 99 because that was the Red Book-limited number of audio tracks allowed on a CD. Thus the original ID3 Tag spec only allowed two digits for track numbers. Because, the thinking at the time went, why would there ever be a need for more? Although I recall that you could "fake" more tracks using CD track indexes. I'm not sure what the spec is now since there's no such thing as audio files anymore. (Just kidding. Been reading too many tech articles on streaming lately.)
I'm going to file the comma issue as a bug just to be ticky-tacky about it, but—also interestingly—the episode number tag does not use comma formatting and it also only accepts integers, at least as far as AppleScript is concerned (you can see the track row at the top of this screenshot):
As I mentioned, it's unlikely most people would ever notice this, but you might if you were taking advantage of this greater-than-999 kludge with AppleScript.
NEW: Doug's Check For Update
While some applets and all apps from this site have a menu command to "Check for Update...", many AppleScripts do not. To make it easier to check if a script you downloaded at one time or another has a newer version available, use Doug's Check For Update. Just drop an AppleScript file on it (or launch it and use an Open Panel to navigate to a specific script) and it will check the website for the latest version of that script:
Sure, it'd be great if I could include a Sparkle-like mechanism to automatically check and install updates—as my apps do. But the code required to do so would just add too much overhead to a—very likely—simple AppleScript.
More information and download is here.
UPDATED: Music Folder Files Not Added v5.2
I think I finally licked a text encoding problem with Music Folder Files Not Added in this latest version.
Music Folder Files Not Added will list the file paths of the files in your designated "iTunes Media" folder which are not in iTunes' track library. Additionally, you can select a different parent folder and its contents will be compared to the iTunes library. The files listed in this screenshot are located in my "iTunes Media" folder but have no associated track entry in iTunes:
Includes options to Filter results, Add a selection of found files to iTunes (Mobile Applications can not be added this way), move them to the Trash, and Export a text file listing the file paths.
Several users had been reporting issues with text encodings (especially with Greek, German and Cyrillic text, but others also) and this version addresses this problem.
More information and download is here.
Is a user playlist Just Smart or a Genius?
Just noticed the most recent iTunes sdef (12.3.1) now contains a genius flag for user playlist. Sometime around iTunes 12, Apple made Smart and Genius playlists both respond to smart and you couldn't tell the difference. It is now possible to distinguish Smart and Genius playlists with AppleScript. Thanks!
NEW: Rating Notify
I used to be pretty good about maintaining my tracks' Ratings. But I have lapsed. I used to use my applet Rate Me! Rate Me! to encourage me to rate tracks as they were playing. But I haven't updated that in a few years and, really, it was conceived before Notifications became available.
And while iTunes Notifications are fine, they don't display the Rating for the track. So I had to roll my own.
Rating Notify is a simple applet that runs in the background and when iTunes plays a Music track it dispatches a Notification displaying the track's Name, Artist, Album, Artwork and Rating. The script can also be set to only show Notifications for tracks without a rating. The tracks in these Notifications, for example, have not been rated:
Clicking the Notification reveals the track in iTunes' Music library so you can work on it—or you could use the iTunes Dock menu to rate it (tracks cannot be rated from the Notification, if that's what you were wondering). Additional options can be set via System Preferences: When the alert style in System Preferences > Notifications for the applet is set to "Banners", Notifications will self-dismiss; when set to "Alerts" each Notification will remain posted until it is user-dismissed, as in the screenshot above.
For iTunes 12 and later/OS X 10.10 and later. More information and download is here.
UPDATED: Join Together v7.5.3
Join Together will create and export a single AAC or ALAC audio file from the audio data of tracks dragged from iTunes or files dragged from the Finder, leaving the original source tracks and files intact.
This latest version, 7.5.3, fixes a problem some users were seeing with encoding at lower sample rates, fixes an issue when using advanced Session Options and has minor performance enhancements. It's a free update for registered users.
You can try Join Together for free in Demo Mode, which will sharply reduce the volume of the exported file after a few minutes. A registration code for Join Together that removes the Demo Mode volume restriction is $5.00.
iTunes play with once is Broken Redux
I posted about this back in July but the problem seemed to go away (which is weird, too).
To play a track just once and then stop you use the once modifier with the play command:
tell application "iTunes"
set aTrack to item 1 of selection
play aTrack with once
end tell
As I said, I first noted this in July when iTunes 12.2 came out. But then I somehow couldn't get it not to work. Also saw a mention of it on the AppleScript mailing list, but even then I got it to work. Well, I definitely can't get it to work now. Filed a bug.
UPDATE: Ah-HA! It will work if the Up Next queue is completely empty, which can be made so by clicking its "Clear" button.
iTunes 12.3.1 Released
Title about says it all. No specific changes mentioned except for "overall stability and performance" improvements.
UPDATED: Now Where Was I? v2.0
Forgot to post about this a few days ago when I actually updated the script.
Now Where Was I? v2.0 is a simple applet that, when run while a track is playing or paused, will "remember" the current track and quit iTunes; when it is next run it will launch iTunes and play that track. If a track is set to "Remember playback position", it will pick up playing from where it left off.
This latest version is generally updated for newer versions of iTunes and the Mac OS. More info and download is here.
