This article at MacUser describes how some record companies are getting a little touchy about lyric-searching apps. Specifically, pearLyrics is a target.
Recently I have received a few seemingly conflicting observations from Correspondents who want to convert their AAC files to "bookmarkable" and having them show up in the iPod's "Audiobook" category. Here's what works at my house: rip the tracks from a CD as AACs; run the script Make Bookmarkable on those AACs; copy them to iPod; they will display in iPod's "Audiobook" section.
Coincidentally, this hint at Mac OS X Hints yesterday discusses using iTunes' "Remember playback position" setting on AAC tracks. While this setting will make any track "bookimarkable", only the "bookmarkability" of an AAC track is recognized by 3G iPods and better.
Thanks to a forum post at this site pointed out to me by Correspondent Tom Robinson, AMG EZ Search, which searches the All Music Guide using data from the selected or playing track, has been updated to correctly replace spaces in search strings with the "|" (pipe) character. This results in much more accurate search queries.
I've been playing around with a method of grabbing particluar text from the filename of a script application. Using such a method would allow non-scripters an easy way of "hard-coding" some text, rather than opening a script and entering a property or setting a variable. Startup iTunes-Some Playlist is my first stab at something practical using this method. The script is an applet that you would load in your Login Items. By changing the "Some Playlist" part of its name to the name of one of your iTunes playlists, the script, when activated at startup, would play that playlist. Specific instructions for changing the filename are included as well as how to set Login Items in the Accounts System Preferences.Of course, you could always just simply write a script applet that played a playlist and load that in Login Items. But where's the challenge in that? :)
While we have two scripts that will copy a single playlist to iPod, several Correspondents have asked about a script that can copy several selected playlists to iPod. Selected Playlists to iPod will do this. The difficulty, if you care, is that one has to wait for a music file to be completely copied to the iPod before copying it to a new iPod playlist; determining when the copying is complete was proving to be a bother. However, this script will wait a second or so for each 10 megabytes of each file before proceeding to copy it to a new iPod playlist. I was able to copy 23 playlists from my iTunes library, each with files ranging from 2 or 3 megabytes to 160 megabytes, to the iPod without difficulty. Let me know how it works for you.
Since the article Managing Scripts With Script Menu went up, a few additions have been made. Additionally, Correspondent David Powers reminded me that compiled AppleScripts for iTunes which are run from Script Menu may take much longer to run. This is due to all the background OSA stuff that has to go on. But David did provide an amazing solution. I'll let you read about it. Meanwhile, I have packaged two scripts that will assist you with migrating your cumbersome collection of iTunes AppleScripts to the Script Menu folders in Migrate to Script Menu. These are the two scripts mentioned in the article.
I've updated the article Managing Scripts With Script Menu to include a script that will create the requisite folders in the appropriate locations such that you can have your iTunes AppleScripts appear in the user scripts section of Script Menu and the application scripts section when iTunes is frontmost. It will also create sub-folders using the names of my script categories. All you have to do is run the script and then copy/move your iTunes AppleScripts to the newly created folders.
A Correspondent recently asked if I could come up with some way of managing all the scripts he had in his iTunes Scripts menu. No need! Using the system-wide Script Menu, you can organize your plethora of iTunes AppleScripts in nested folders. Here's an article with a few tips on how to get it going.
Some of my iTunes tracks don't have "official" artwork, so for these tracks I like to use a graphic that simply says "no cover". Is that weird? Anyway, I got tired of having to locate the graphic each time I wanted to apply it to some tracks, so I wrote Set No Cover. It knows where the graphic is and applies it to the selected tracks. And in case you don't like the graphic supplied--which comes from the All Music Guide website--you can create your own and use the accompanying droplet to convert it to the correct format and save it to the location where the script expects it to be.
I often get queries from Correspondents regarding the inability of some AppleScripts (and some of my shareware apps which are AppleScript based) to access files when File Vault is activated. Does "Finder got an error: Can't get name of alias "your_disk_path" number -1728" look familiar? The trouble is that File Vault encrypts your "home" directory. AppleScript cannot penetrate File Vault so you will get an error when you run an AppleScript that attempts to access any files in the home directory. There's no way around this. Isn't that a good thing? However, I suppose that there may be a way of catching the error before the script tries to run; but even so, if you are using File Vault and you are getting errors from AppleScripts, could you just turn File Vault off for a bit while the script needs to work? I dunno. Seems to me you only want File Vault operative when you are not around. Maybe that's a Whole 'Nother AppleScript. I have never used File Vault so I don't know.
Correspondent Will Friedwald wanted to convert a bunch of his old MP3 Artist tags that were of the format 'Last Name, First Name' to 'First Name Last Name'. Restore Artist 'Last, First...', although it doesn't recognize names per se, does recognize the ", " separator and will juxtapose the text on either side of it.
I have been severely remiss in answering email queries over the past few weeks and I apologize. If you have sent me a question and I have not responded please re-send and I'll try my best. Please remember that I am not an iTunes Guy but an iTunes AppleScript Guy and if your questions have more to do with using iTunes rather than 'scripting it then I may not get back to you as quickly as you'd like.
Steve Meuse likes to Copy Tracks to Multiple Playlists. Now you can, too! This script will copy the selected tracks to any number of playlists that are choosable (er, I mean "able to be chosen") from a choose from list dialog box.
Well, as much as how neat I thought it was, I eliminated the fixed header here at the site. It was just causing too much confusion with scrolling and hitting name anchors correctly. I wanted to keep the search forms and main menu stuff In Yer Face but you'll just have to remember that all that stuff is at the top of every page.