iTunes Remote Management Scripts

iTunes lets you access songs shared on a remote computer. But it’s sort of a one-way relationship. You can’t edit the playlists or copy the actual song files between computers. Unless you get a little help.

Downloading the Remote Management Scripts provides more functionality. The scripts act on tracks you’ve selected in a shared library. Then they use mechanisms like Personal File Sharing and Remote Apple Events to copy or edit those tracks. Or edit the playlist. There’s even a script to copy tracks from the local machine to the library on the remote machine. And vice versa.

Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes provides the scripts, along with hundreds of other useful scripts. You might not realize how many things iTunes doesn’t do until you see what all these scripts can do.

This set of scripts comes with a handy centralized file for storing your specific system information, like computer and user names. The other scripts call this script at run time. You might want to leave your password out of the script for security reasons. But you’ll be prompted at run time.

We saw Remote Apple Events earlier in the week, with Remote Remote. Remote Remote facilitates playback on a remote machine along with several other functions.

iTunes Drag and Drop

We’re keeping it simple today because tomorrow we’ve got very advanced stuff to wrap up iTunes Week. Well, maybe not that advanced. But it’s a good one. Today we’re going to show you two things you may have overlooked in iTunes.

First, we have making playlists on the fly. Highlight some tracks from the library or another playlist, and drag them over to a blank spot where your other playlists are parked. The tracks will be added to a new playlist, waiting to be renamed.

You know you can control-click a track and see its location in Finder. This makes it easy to copy the file or back it up - or do something with it. But if you select multiple tracks the Show in Finder choice disappears.

Not a problem. If you need to do something with the underlying files of your tracks just drag them out to a Finder folder. The files will be copied and you can burn them to a dvd, copy them to a laptop, or drop them to an external disk.

Tune back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion to iTunes Week. We’ll be using the Share feature in iTunes to copy songs from a remote computer.

iTunes Alarm Clock

You Mac has some pretty fancy features built into its hardware, including the ability to turn itself on when it’s sleeping or powered off. This capability leverages nicely into an iTunes alarm clock.

In the screencast we’ll use the System Preferences to turn the Mac on at a specified time. Then we’ll set an appointment in iCal that runs an AppleScript a few minutes later. The script will kick off a Playlist in iTunes loaded with songs we’d like to wake up to.

Murphy made a few different scripts for the job. You can pick one or combine pieces from all of them to make your own. Here’s what they do:

• Wakeup1.scpt Script simply plays a Playlist
• Wakeup2.scpt Script plays each track in a Playlist for a specified number of seconds. That should annoy you out of bed.
• Volume.scpt Script gradually increases the iTunes volume until you click stop in iTunes.

You can download the scripts and edit them for your own needs. Feel free to post improvements in the comments.

We’re halfway through iTunes week. We’ll look at more AppleScripts the rest of the week courtesy of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Don’t forget to check back! Or better yet, subscribe to Murphy’s feed.

Smart Playlist Power with Folders

Keeping your Playlists in folders is a quick way to increase the effectiveness of your Smart Playlists. For example, if you want to make a Smart Playlist that checks several Playlists for some criteria, like the song rating, you could add each of those Playlists to the Smart Playlist. But you have to keep adding rules, setting the criteria, and setting the value.

Instead you could just reference a folder that holds the collection of Playlists you need to query. Dragging a Playlist into a folder is quicker and easier than adding fifteen rules to a Smart Playlist. You wouldn’t keep all your files in the root of your disk in Finder, it makes more sense to use folders. The same logic applies to iTunes. Keep your Playlists in a logical network of folders and you’ll find it’s easier to manage all those lists.

The screencast shows how to quickly make a Smart Folder listing tracks that haven’t been added to any other Playlist. Murphy picked this tip up from an article in Macworld magazine. The article also mentions scripts which can accomplish the same task. Stay tuned, Murphy will cover some iTunes scripts as the week continues.

iTunes Remote Control Made Easy

Apple already lets you play songs on a remote Mac through the Mac you’re sitting at with its Sharing feature. But what if you want to control songs playing on that remote Mac? Maybe the computer in the kitchen controls an Airport Express connected to your stereo. Can you fire up a playlist on the kitchen Mac from your Macbook in the den? You can. And there are a couple of ways to do it. The easy way? Get yourself a copy of Remote Remote.

It lets you skip through songs, select playlists, and even rate your tracks. Remote Remote has a clean interface with well-designed controls. You can even add tracks to a special playlist to mark them for further action later.

Remote Remote requires a user password on your Mac hosting the iTunes library. And you have to enable Remote Apple Events in the System Preferences. But that’s not much to ask.

The iTunes interface doesn’t have built-in keyboard shortcuts for rating your tracks. But Remote Remote does. Murphy hopes to have a rating on every track in his library by 2019. Other features include putting a remote Mac to sleep, starting iTunes on the remote Mac, adding track comments, and controlling the equalizer.

You could use something like VNC to control the remote Mac, but Remote Remote handles the task far more directly. Watch the screencast to see Remote Remote’s features in action. Or download it here and try it out for yourself.