Murphy Mac

You’d think this soon after wrapping iTunes week we’d be done with iTunes. But there’s one more script to take a look at before we put the jukebox on the back burner for a while.

Do you remember the days before iTunes and iPods when you listened to Double Shot days on the radio? Block Parties with three or four songs in a row by the same group?

The Block Party script generates a somewhat random playlist that includes multiple songs by each included artist. How many songs? That’s up to you. How big is the list? You can specify a number of artists or a duration. The download includes a readme with more information, like how to change the name of the playlist the script creates.

The script comes from Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes - a site we visited last week.

Murphy is feeling nostalgic for Double Shot Tuesdays on WMMR in Philadelphia. You?

Our week of iTunes wrapped up on Friday. We covered some good stuff, including a freeware application for controlling a remote Mac running iTunes. We also installed scripts that gave us some power when accessing a shared library. And we used folders in Smart Playlist rules.
Murphy’s favorite thing from iTunes Week was using scripts to control the volume of iTunes. You can also use AppleScript to control your System Volume. Like this:

Tell Application “Finder”

set volume 4

End Tell

This is great for something like Murphy’s iTunes alarm clock. You don’t want to have to tweak the volume before you go to bed so your Mac isn’t blaring in the morning. Let the script do the work. iTunes Volume can be set from 1 to 100 but the System Volume range is 1 to 7. Click here to download Murphy’s new script that adjusts both the System Volume and the iTunes Volume at run time - and then gradually increase the volume. Visit Doug’s AppleScripts for more iTunes scripting help.

Odds & Ends

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.

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.

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.