defaults write com.apple.iTunes NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Target Search Field" "@F"

[Search local iTunes via Command-F | Macworld](http://www.macworld.com/article/1056833/searchtunes.html)

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
     on open thefiles
          repeat with afile in thefiles
               set afile to afile as text
               tell application "VLC"
                    activate
                    OpenURL afile
                    play
                    fullscreen
               end tell
          end repeat
     end open
end using terms from

Introduction
Mac AirVideo Client is a Mac GUI client application that can interact with the Air Video Server from Air Video using the airvideo.rb ruby script created by jphastings

Streaming
Air Video can stream videos in almost any format to your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.  And now to your Mac.  You don't need to copy your videos to the device just to watch them.

Server
The Server can be downloaded from here

This is a list (a very subjective list) of scripts that perform tasks you may wish were actual iTunes Menu commands. Just copy and paste 'em to your AppleScript Editor and save to your iTunes Scripts folder...then add a Shortcut.

Optionally, you can click the mini-AppleScript Editor icon link beneath each snippet to open the script in AppleScript Editor on your computer. These links use URL Protocol Messaging to safely and securely send the contents of the script to your AppleScript Editor application.

12 Second Fade/Stop and Next Track
Artist to Album Artist
Choose Playlist
Current Track to (Select Playlist)
De-Shuffle All Playlists
Delete Selected Playlists
Eject iPods
Erase Bookmark
Jump to Playlist
Just Played These
Open iTunes Scripts folder
Play Random Playlist
Play Random Track of Random Playlist
Play Selected Track Once
Remove (Album Version)
Remove SOME TEXT From Names
Reset Start and Stop Times
Search Results to New Playlist
Selected Tracks to Current Playlist
Set Skipped Count/Skipped Date
Show Get Info Window of a Track's File
Skip Ahead n Seconds
Skip and Pretend We Played This
Super Shuffle
Toggle Checkmarks of Selected
Toggle Mute
View Current Playlist
Virgin Again

Selection Routines
Single Selected Track
Get a reference to a single selected track.
Each Selected Track
Get a list of references to each selected track.
Select Playing or Single Selected Track
Get a reference to the current track if player is paused or playing; otherwise, check for a single selected track.
Selected Tracks or Entire Playlist
Repeat with a reference to each of the selected tracks; or, if no tracks are selected, repeat with a reference for each track in the currently selected playlist.
Handlers
Is iTunes Running
Returns true or false.
Choose/Restore Encoder
Change encoders on-the-fly and restore Preferences-set encoder afterwards.
Nuke Track 1
Delete a track from iTunes entirely.
Nuke Track 2
Delete a track from iTunes entirely and delete its file immediately (and unrecoverably).
Nuke Track 3
Delete a track from iTunes entirely and move its file to the Trash.
text_to_list(), list_to_text(), replace_chars()
Frequently helpful text and list handlers.
Basic Idle Routine
Checks for new current track. Save as Stay-Open Application.
List Manually Managed iPods
Sets two corresponding lists to manually managed iPod names and source references
Export Artwork as File to Folder
Supply an iTunes track reference, path to folder as text, name of new file as text, and scale in pixels. NOTE: probably will not work with iTunes 9/Snow Leopard. See the slightly updated version below.
Export Artwork as File to Folder II
Supply an iTunes track reference, path to folder as text, name of new file as text, and scale in pixels.This version seems to work better in Snow Leopard with iTunes 9
Rating to Text Stars
Pass the value of a track’s rating property. Regretably, the chevrons in the Unicode do not translate into UPM so you’ll have to copy-and-paste this off the page.

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Do Something When

I watch quite a few DVDs through my iPod Video on my way to and from work. I usually convert my films with Handbrake in MP4 format to the Desktop. I have iTunes set to organise my music and films automatically, which means that all files dragged into it are copied to ~/Music -> iTunes -> iTunes Music. I wanted to find a solution to avoid copying the films and have them put in my film library with Automator.

First, I found out that all my films are stored in a folder called "Unknown artist." Moving the file there before loading it in iTunes will avoid the copy process. Secondly, I found out that the iTunes Automator action for importing media into iTunes couldn't import MP4 files. I had to use an AppleScript to do that instead. So here are the steps in my Automator workflow:
Finder library, Get Specified Finder Items action.
Finder library, Move Finder Items action, to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Unknown Artist/
Automator library, Run AppleScript action, with the following AppleScript:
on run {input, parameters}

tell application "iTunes"
launch
set this_track to add input to playlist "Library" of source "Library"
duplicate this_track to playlist "film"
end tell

return input
end run
I then save it into ~/Library -> Workflows -> Applications -> Finder" as iTunes Film. Then all I need to do is control-click on the film on the Desktop and chose Automator > iTunes Film from the pop-up menu.

Description: Every line in an M3U file is either a comment, a blank, or a resource to render. A comment line begins with the pound sign, #. Blanks are ignored. A resource is the address of a media file.
A resource address can be anything the M3U reader is capable of understanding. These include absolute filesystem paths, relative filesystem paths (with the base undefined by the file format), and URLs.

A resource can be anything the M3U reader is capable of rendering. To my knowledge these are always audio files, but there is no set reason for that to be true. However, it may not be wise to point to proprietary media formats like Real streaming audio in an M3U file, since many players will throw a user-visible error for media they cannot render.

The design philosophy of M3U is to let resource data types do the work. Players that don't understand an address or resource type usually skip the entry. The ability to reference URLs, in addition to filesystem paths, was added this way; some players (Winamp and XMMS, notably) simply added the ability to handle URLs to their M3U readers.

Support for M3U features varies wildly. iTunes, for example, will only render the first entry in an M3U file.

M3U is by far the most popular playlist format, probably due to its simplicity. It is an ad-hoc standard with no formal definition, no canonical source, and no owner.

Example:
# This is an absolute filesystem path
c:/music/foo.mp3

# This is a relative filesystem path
foo/fighters.mp3

# This is a URL
http://foofighters.com/somesong.mp3

Mime type:
audio/mpegurl (recommended)

audio/x-mpegurl
Distinguishing features: A simple list of files, one per line.
Definition URL: http://www.schworak.com/programming/music/playlist_m3u.asp
Originator: Winamp (?)
Implementations: Winamp, XMMS, many more
Metadata support: Before ID3 tags were widely supported by MP3 players, a flavor of M3U called Extended M3U was used to indicate audio metadata. Extended M3U is now obsolete. The following description of Extended M3U is copied in verbatim from Google's cache of the reverse-engineered documentation at http://hanna.pyxidis.org/tech/m3u.html, which is now a defunct URL.

PHP Class to parse iTunes Library XML Files. See example.php for example usage. The library is an array of track objects. The track object has no methods, but contains the following properties: Track_ID Name Artist Album Genre Kind Size Total_Time Track_Number Year Date_Modified Date_Added Bit_Rate Sample_Rate Comments Play_Count Play_Date Play_Date_UTC Persistent_ID Track_Type Location File_Folder_Count Library_Folder_Count

OK, I’ll confess upfront I’ve not tried this one yet although I hope to tomorrow. I got this info from Ars.

The basic problem is when you have a movie you’ve ripped but you want to watch it both on your Apple TV and your iPhone. Now ideally you’d want two different sizes. The iPhone doesn’t need the resolution you’d rip for the Apple TV plus you want the size to be as small as possible. Now if you’ve ever bought a show from iTunes you’ll note that Apple gives you both hi-res and low res versions. How do they do this? Well it turns out it’s just a tag on the MPEG-4 file. And there is a shell script to set those tags so you can do it with your own files.

First download and install mp4v2. Yes, you have to compile it. However if you have MacPorts you can also install it that way.

the trickiest part of cleaning ones iTunes library is looking up missing album information. There are a few applications that do this by mathematically analyzing the song’s music itself against a library. The problem is that this isn’t that accurate. There was an old app that did this (no longer available) called iEatzBrains or something like that. Unfortunately I made the mistake of running it against a bunch of tracks after testing it. Only then did I find that it’s accuracy was about 90%. So to be honest I am still finding tracks that had their artist and album names “revised” because of that. (I’d say that event caused about half of my library errors)

So I’m really leery of that sort of thing. However trying to find a script that could give a guess at album names was surprisingly hard. There weren’t any. There was a database of album information called discogs but it really didn’t let you search by track info. It was all oriented around correct album information. (Although it is useful for other metadata – as we’ll see in the future)

I did some pretty elaborate Google searching and remarkably this isn’t a problem that folks have solved. (Or at least they haven’t put solutions up online) Fortunately I found a solution from an unusual source: Apple.

Apple actually has a web API for searching the iTunes store. The documentation (oddly labeled “confidential” but publicly available) is quite helpful. What I did was to do an artist search returning just track information. Effectively getting a list of all songs by that artist. The returned data is even in JSON format rather than XML! This means I can make all the returned data into a Python dict with the simplejson module and a single call.

All I do then is just compare the selected song in iTunes (using Appscript) with the songs in the iTunes store. Now I could make this part a bit more intelligent by normalizing unicode characters and perhaps removing padding words like “a” or “the.” Thus far I’ve not had any trouble so I’ve not bothered making it “brighter.”

To avoid the problem of entering album information that is wrong and then never being able to find the changed files I put pretty extensive comments in each track. If the song could be from more than one album I put the other alternative albums in. Even if (as is typical) there’s only one album the track is on I put a note in the comments.

What’s surprising is how short the code is. (Take out all the comments in the code and there really isn’t much to it) My previous attempt using discog’s XML was at least 3 – 4 times as long and not nearly as accurate.

There are some amazing Python programmers out there who can do some pretty impressive and abstract stuff. However most of what I use Python for is as a quick and dirty scripting system. I’m rarely writing full elegant programs. Rather I just want to get something done and done quickly. Most of the time I’m not looking for every potential boundary problem. I’ll be able to tell if it doesn’t do what I want!

One thing I sometimes want to do it fix names in iTunes. That’s because I have some files where the name is mangled. (It’s all lower case, it has the track number prepended, or the like) While it’s possible to write a general case solution to this problem it’s much better to just have a script framework and modify a few lines for the particular problem.

Here’s how I do it using Appscript.

I wanted to start with the finding of duplicates. Now you could use a program like fdupes or dupes.py (discussed a few weeks ago). Those aren’t ideal. In the past I’ve used Doug’s Applescripts. He has several useful scripts. One is Remove Dead Tracks which gets those entries where the file is long gone. (I don’t know how that happens – it’s usually stuff I don’t want anyway) His other famous script is Corral iTunes Dupes which I’ve used in the past to find duplicate tracks.

What this script does is look up the standardized spelling for artists. As ever I work on a playlist you create. In this case the playlist “__Fix Arists” (without the quotes) I’d suggest adding to this list manually rather than trying to automate it. Both for safety (because it’s easy to undo if you just have a single artist in there) but also it just keeps things simple. If you need you could easily add in a routine to work on a selection. I’ll put that in the script but comment it out.

This is the second in a series of posts on cleaning up my library in iTunes. Last time we discussed using Dupin to find duplicates. This week I want to focus on the problem of capitalization of song names. If you are like me you have a few songs in your library where the case is screwed up. (Sometimes even the database of CD song names has some mistakes – most of my bad titles were from ripped CDs) What I want to do is use TitleCase (discussed last week) to check to see if the titles are correct. Because some titles are supposed to be weird rather than just automatically fixing things I just add the files to a special playlist. To keep my “fix it” playlists separate from my regular ones I always prepend them with two underscore characters. (I usually then delete them when I’m done — although you don’t have to)

I have just installed Snow Leopard and came upon some excellent sites which have inspired me to learn the programming language Python

The first site is Clark’s Tech Blog

The articles listed below are excellent examples of using Python to manage your itunes library, well worth the read.

* Fix iTunes Names
* Cleaning iTunes Pt. 1
* Cleaning iTunes Pt. 2: Title Case
* Cleaning iTunes Pt. 3: Album Names