Slashdot Mirror

It would be rather trivial for Palm to write their own sync app that, through Apple's own published public APIs, could sync with an iTunes library through software. Palm just wants a free ride. Apple are well within their rights to stick it to them.

iTunes SDK for Windows

Apple Script for OS X

If you're running a mac and have all your files in an itunes library, then Dupin is extremely useful. It matches on name, size, length, bit rate, or all at once.

It's pretty useful, and the freeware version lets your delete from drive as well as library.

If you're on windows, I searched for years and couldn't find anything :(

On OSX, iTunes _does_ pick things up.

For an extremely small set of "things", sure.

You've never heard of AppleScript, have you?

JavaScript, JScript, VBScript, straight COM.

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/windowshelp.php

Monitoring a folder is something you can script. Slashdotters ought have no problems with this...

Applescript (weird, english-like language that it is) is actually pretty powerful - Apple do make an effort to open up their apps for scripting, even though they're really GUI apps, and it's a really under-used feature. Shame.

Simon

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php

Assuming you're on a Mac, there are quite a few Applescripts that can help with batch editing tags: http://dougscripts.com/

I did understand you weren't really talking about interface -- I just know that many people complain about iTunes performance on Windows and it is a much snappier and happier program on the Mac. And while you do point out some of the design limitations, I submit that most of them are actually very logical choices made for legitimate reasons even though I disagree with some of them -- that's pretty much been my experience in general on the Mac since I switched, it certainly is not a perfect system, but even the things that I dislike make sense once I think about why they behave the way they do. Few things are accidental or just cobbled together.

The real beauty, though, is that everything on the system is scriptable and communicates with any other programs that care to. I'm with you -- the metadata in my music collection is more important than the music itself. So I whipped up a couple Applescripts in an afternoon (mind you I had no experience whatsoever with Applescript before I began, but they read like plain English instructions and are only a half dozen lines each) that backed up the particular metadata I was concerned about and was able to restore it arbitrarily, rather than being dependent on the itunes library XML file or worrying about moving my music to a different system in the future and losing something.

In general, OS X really is an ecosystem -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's pretty impossible to display in any way by merely porting specific applications, because you're missing all the other pieces. iTunes on Windows has all the same features as the OS X version, and yet it can do so very much less that I hate using it. Visit dougscripts.com and you see that iTunes on the Mac is more like Firefox or Foobar2000 -- it's all about the extensions rather than the program itself.

Expose and Dashboard, for example, basically wouldn't work without the underlying window frame buffering philosophy on OS X. You can fake it by just throwing tons of horsepower in a Windows graphics card, but 90% of people who try to use a Windows workalike of Expose are going to be sorely disappointed and say "wow, this Apple stuff sucks", because frankly it would. Trying to fake Spotlight would require scanning the disk periodically (and being out of date periodically) the way Google desktop search and Windows search do. On the Mac, it's automagic.

If you want to drop media files on an icon and they go directly on your iPod you can do that very easily with iPod + iTunes if you are using a Mac.

iTunes on the Mac is scriptable, its functionality is exposed as programmatic objects. If your iPod is called "iPod" and you make a playlist in iTunes called "iPod Playlist" and set your iPod to sync whatever is on that playlist, then you can use this AppleScript to add files to your iPod:

on open theFiles
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with theFile in theFiles
add theFile to playlist "iPod Playlist"
end repeat
update "iPod"
end tell
end open

(Paste the above script into Script Editor and Save as an application. Drop files on your new application to add them to your iPod. Repeat.)

You can also add files directly to the iPod using "device playlist" but it is probably not necessary.

The above is a top-of-the-head simple example. You could easily add to it to deal with a full iPod, to remove the oldest items from the playlist in that case or whatever. The point is that you don't have to work with iTunes in the way that everyone else does, its functionality can be used as a library for your AppleScript applications.

This is a good place to start for iTunes scripting:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/

One burden of being a Mac user is watching Windows users always doing things the hard way.

CK's Put Speech on Your iPod v0.04
already done.

I love eMusic, btw -- been a member for 4 years.

In terms of organization, I don't understand your statement about iTunes, though. I've got 40000 songs (legal, btw), and I can't imagine trying to keep them organized any other way. Between Smart Playlists and the handy scripts from here, I haven't found a lot I can't accomplish.

If you can use Applescript you can script it. Scroll to "Search Command" on this page. If not, how about creating a new smart playlist where the first condition is Playlist Is 'the desired playlist' and second condition (to get a second condition click the + button on the far right) is Artist contains 'artist name'?

My two cents on this since I just converted the 17 disc Harry Potter to bookmarkable AAC. I used iTunes 4.9 to rip the CDs using the new Podcast "optimize for voice" preset. NOTE: Bigger files are supposed to be more skip prone and eat more battery life due to the way the hd & cache are handled so I kept my files to single chapters which were about 40 minutes each, encoded at 64kbps.

I used "Join Tracks" to gather each chapter into an individual file), but a few chapters were spread over 2 consecutive discs and I wanted to combine them, so I used mp4box (Windows, Linux, but not OS X) to losslessly concatenate the AAC files. I then manually used a hex editor to change the file type from "M4A " to "M4B " and changed the file extension from .m4a to .m4b and changed the genre from "Books & Spoken" to "Audiobook". (AFAIK the rename trick only works on Windows, while the hex editing also works on OS X) Created a Smart Playslist for the whole set of files and enjoyed.

A few more possibly useful links MarkAble (Windows only) is supposed to help automate the process I went through, but I'm not sure how it concatenates the files and wanted to learn, and the aforementioned Doug's Applescripts has Join Together (OS X only), but that requires QTPro and it is still not clear whether this is a lossless concatenation or not.

There is an option in iTunes to rip CDs into AAC. You can then use a script to convert the file into an enhanced AAC, which is bookmarkable. Check out http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php for lots of scripts for doing things of this sort.

I suppose I could write a script that I could run before and after syncing the shuffle to put the songs whose play counts have changed into a "recent shuffled" playlist, but I think I've already spent way too much time on fine-tuning my iTunes settings.

Or you could let somebody do it for you! :)

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?s p=updateshufflelastplayed

Haven't used it yet, but something you might want to check out. Looks like it does exactly what you're talking about doing.

Assuming this script works, thanks Google!

A workaround for now (on OS X):

1. Set your importing preferences to AAC
2. Install this Make Bookmarable Applescript
3. Select the MP3, go to Advanced->Convert to AAC
4. Select the newly-created AAC, run the Make Bookmarkable script on it

would agree that making an AAC bookmarkable could do with being integrated into the main interface though.

Cheers,
Ian