Oopscripts

Below are some Applescripts for use with iTunes.  I wrote them because I was interested in the the results myself.  The last several are more fun or nerdy than they are necessary.  A description and link to go with each one is given below.  At left, the link OopsAppleScripts will lead you to a listing of them.

Have you ever wanted to look for songs which have not been played in a given period of time (as designated by you) and then create a playlist with the whole album on which those songs reside (or whatever parts of that album are in your library)?  The Smart Playlists will do the first, but you'll have to seek out the rest of the album yourself.  GetAlbumsOlderThanYDays will locate all songs which have not been played in the last Y days (you enter the value for Y), and for each song collect the rest of the songs from that album and create a playlist containing all these songs.  After it finishes, you can sort the playlist by Album and then transfer whole albums (some of whose songs are neglected) to your iPod or to another playlist for playing on you computer.  How GetAlbumsHalfOlderThanYDays differs is that it will only create the playlist if at least half of the songs on that album have been similarly neglected.  The 'half' can be easily changed to a third, etc.  They are now improved so that they do not balk at libraries with unlocated tracks (an exclamation point by some tracks).

The next two address the following 'problem'.  The play count indicates somewhat the popularity of a song, but the play count can also be a function of how long you've had the song in your library.  They compute the average frequency with which each song has been played and then sorts the songs into five playlists and five text files which it places on your desktop.  One playlist is for those songs which are so new to your library that their play frequency (in average days between plays) is misleading, another playlist is for those remaining songs played most frequently, another is for those remaining songs played least frequently, and another playlist is for those whose play frequency lies in between.  The final playlist is of songs which have never been played.  The text files which are created are similar and contain the name, artist and play frequency of the songs.  Two additional text files are created, one for those songs which have never been played, and one to report on the statistics.  The difference between the them is that PlayFrequencyByQuartiles actually sorts the songs from most frequently played to least frequently played and puts the top 25% in one playlist (and textfile), the middle 50% in another playlist (and textfile), and the bottom 25% in another playlist (and textfile), while PlayFrequencyUserDefined divides the songs into playlists by user-defined frequencies (a most-often played, a least-often played, and a middle group, where the play-frequency bound is set by you). 

     

To go with these,  IndividualPlayFrequency  computes the frequency played for an individual track.

The scripts TotalDaysMusicListeningTime sums the product of the play count and the length of each song for all the songs in your library...basically, your total listening time.  This script has been improved so that it no longer counts your audio books (if you've set the genre of your audiobooks to the preset "Books and Spoken".

The final script ResetPlaycountToSpecificValue allows you to reset the played count of a particular track to a specific value (If you are interested in play frequencies, then you might want to roll back inadvertent plays, or the played count after buying an iTunes Plus track, but not all the way to 0).

I hope you enjoy them.

Subpages (1): OopsAppleScripts
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