Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Let’s say you download a podcast every week and with each new episode you find yourself modifying the same parameters in its metadata, in order that it will slot nicely into your way of organizing iTunes albums and playlists. Here’s an example: Every week I change the Artist for MacBreak Weekly to Leo Laporte, instead of Leo Laporte and whoever else is on the show (for neatness sake).

Automator has a nice reliable tool just for this sort of repetitive task. Here’s how you set it up.
 

 
Inside Automator, select iTunes and then drag the Get Selected iTunes Items action into the right-hand pane. Next, drag over the Set Info of iTunes Songs action. Then configure how you want the metadata overwritten. You can test the action by selecting a track in iTunes then pressing the Play button in Automator.

Once you’re happy with the action you can save it as an application. What I did in this example was to then find the saved application and drag it into Butler’s configuration pane, adding it to my iTunes menu.
 

 
Butler gave the menu item the ugly robot icon so I changed that to a musical clef from the Looks preference inside that item’s Inspector.
 

 
Two final things to add: Firstly, if you’re nervous about Automator chomping through your files, you can click the Options triangle when configuring an action and have it step through the action and ask you for parameters and confirmation every time it’s run. Secondly, you can of course add more steps to the action; in the example above I also invoke an AppleScript that makes the selected track bookmark-able, but that’s another post…