iTunes on both the Mac and PC is a terrific application, but it has a singular advantage on the Mac—its support of Apple’s scripting language, AppleScript. Regrettably, writing AppleScripts is beyond the ken of a lot of Mac users. Fortunately, that makes not a whit of difference thanks to Doug Adams and his invaluable site, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.
Here you’ll find a vast collection of scripts that do everything from grabbing album artwork via Google, to removing missing tracks from your iTunes library, to making AAC-encoded tracks bookmarkable.
To make finding the finest scripts a little easier, Doug has agreed to pop into Playlist from time to time to let us know what’s new and cool. To whet our appetite, he begins with a list of ten scripts he’d want on hand if he was marooned on a desert island with an iMac, an iPod, and a broadband connection.
Import iPod Audio Files – Select tracks on the iPod and then run this script to copy the selected files to your Mac’s Music folder and add as library tracks to iTunes.
Quick Convert – This script allows you to convert or import all or just the selected tracks in a playlist using your choice of available encoders (thus saving you a trip to iTunes’ Preferences to change its encoding options). When the script is done, it restores the encoder settings to the values set prior to running the script.
Super Remove Dead Tracks – Surveys iTunes for tracks that are no longer available on the local drive (as indicated by a “!” next to their names) and removes them.
Make Bookmarkable – Change the file type of the selected AAC tracks to “M4B”, thus making them bookmarkable.
Rip to iPod – Rips each enabled CD track to iTunes and immediately copies it to your iPod, deletes the file, and removes the track from the iTunes library, giving the appearance of seamless CD-to-iPod importing.
Find Album Artwork With Google – Performs a Google image search using an album’s name with the hope of finding the corresponding album artwork.
Google Lyric Search – Uses the name and artist of the current or selected track as the basis for a search for lyric sites with Google.
Export Artwork to iPhoto 5 – Export the artwork of the selected tracks—or tracks of the selected Playlist—to iPhoto 5, where they will also be copied to a “My iTunes Artwork” album.
CDDB Safari Kit – Two AppleScripts, “CDDB Safari” and “CDDB Tracks to iTunes via Safari”, assist in finding and retrieving album track information, album, artist, and year from Gracenote’s CDDB website using Apple’s Safari browser.
This Tag, That Tag Scripts – Four scripts that assist with swapping, copying, and appending data between two user-chosen tags.