Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Ok. Apple special event time again tomorrow morning. Here are my hunches/predictions:

1. iTunes will have a major revamp and it will be renamed iMedia or some such thing, to reflect the fact that it’s just as much about movies and iPhone apps as it is about music.

2. There will be a music subscription service where for $15 a month you can download all the music you want, but when you stop paying, that music disappears.

3. A new iPod nano, like the generation 2 model, but with the wheel at the bottom and the rest of the front taken up with a vertical screen. Flip it sideways for screening movies and the new orientation of the wheel is reflected by a virtual wheel that appears on the screen whenever you touch the real one.

4. Announcement that 10 million iPhones have now been sold. Thanks for coming. Goodbye. Event ends with some hip band playing live.

I’m always a little nervous when it comes to OS updates. On the one hand it’s always nice to be up to date, but on the other, why risk breaking something that’s so stable in its current state.

When I looked at the specs of the 10.4.11 update the list of fixes looked very arcane, and not particularly exciting or relevant to my situation. But there also was included the final and supposedly stable version of Safari 3; and this was the only way to get a hold of it. I bit the bullet, induced by the prospect of exploring the new Safari.

I installed the upgrade and had no problems at all with the OS side of things; it was Safari itself that caused what grief I had. None of my SIMBL driven hacks liked it; several keyboard shortcuts had been changed — screwing up some of my Butler macros, and to me, it seems slower. Worse still, it was now here to stay (shades of the whole Microsoft IE embedded into the Windows OS brouhaha, but that’s another story).

This is the price one pays for tinkering, I guess. I don’t mean tinkering as in doing the upgrade; I mean tinkering as in having a pimped Safari to be upgraded. When I think back on all the software platforms I’ve used, PC, Mac and handheld, there was always some third party add-on that made each one “just so.”

Speaking of upgrades, have you noticed that Apple is more and more in the habit of adding some gift with each one? All of the iPhone and Touch updates, and the latest revisions to iTunes, have been primarily designed to stomp the latest hack, but they all add some new cool functionality that (probably) should have been there all along.

Here is the scenario: you have a six CD audio book that you rip into iTunes. You then select all the tracks in the resulting enormous Album in iTunes and choose to Remember Position in each track, and you set the combined play count to zero.

You make a Smart Playlist for listening to the book, similar to the configuration shown above; each time you re-visit this playlist it picks up where you left off, and only shows the remaining unheard tracks. All fine and good.

But, the problem is that you also want to take the book with you, but the iPod that you use only has a limited capacity. Here’s the trick:

You can make a second Smart Playlist that refers to the first. This one is limited by size to whatever you can spare (in this case, 50MB). Now you set up your iPod to sync with the second Playlist.

When you’re at your Mac you can listen to either; they will automatically update each other. Why have two at all though? Why not just create the second 50MB Playlist? Well, the short Playlist is the slice off the top of the pile of files still to be heard; the long Playlist is the whole pile, which gives you more of a sense of how far there is to go.

Playlists can’t easily be duplicated or copied and then modified, but by using new Playlists that refer to existing ones you can make refined choices based on existing criteria.

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…

If you are viewing a playlist in Cover Flow or Album View mode and it’s sorted by album, you can drag that album cover to any destination on your Mac to copy the actual files there. Might be a quick way to load up a non-iPod music player.

Below is an example of the sort of iTunes controller menu that can be created using Butler, the donationware do-almost-anything software from Peter Maurer.

With this pop up menu I can manipulate iTunes, even when it’s hidden — calling it up with a Butler universal hotkey. In Butler you make new containers (essentially folders), and within those containers you add, among other things, so-called Smart Items; you then assign the new container a hotkey and choose for it to open as a menu, and you’re done.

Clicking on Leo Laporte in this menu will show all of his albums and tracks; clicking on MacBreak Weekly will show all the tracks in the current album. The Back and Forward entries with the squiggly icons are a little different — they’re applescript code. All of the actions in the menu can be assigned their own hotkeys that will be invoked regardless of the application that you currently have in the foreground.

I’ve seen a lot of apps that control one or two aspects of iTunes, or apps for app launching, or clipboard management and my first snarky reaction is always the same…

Butler already does that.

Convert To MP3 is another of those handy “Well” applications where you drop a file on its window and it processes it without asking for parameters.

In this case you are dropping a movie file (MOV, MP4, whatever) and it is extracting the audio from the file and converting it into an MP3 file.

It then saves that MP3 file with the same name as the movie, and in the same folder.

It actually uses the power of iTunes and QuickTime to accomplish this, so it pays to have the latest versions of those apps installed. When you drop the movie it opens iTunes which imports it and then converts to MP3. The MP3 file is then moved back out and the movie is deleted from iTunes.

If you are wondering about those non-standard icons seen above: The MP3 icon is achieved by hacking the default iTunes MP3 icon, with the help of CandyBar. While the film-clip icon is achieved by copying a frame from the Enzo movie, with the help of the Quick Play contextual menu plugin, from Pixture Studio.

Learn more about Convert To MP3

Here’s my latest iPod and iTunes discovery. Well, here’s the problem first, and this relates back to this entry. I like to take the latest podcasts downloaded as files directly from their sites, rather than from the iTunes Store, and as I listen to them I want to mark them and then see a list of “yet to be heard” files.

I didn’t realize until now that smart playlists were also “smart” when they got on the iPod, but they are, or so it seems. So my new playlist looks at the New Podcast playlist and only shows the files that haven’t got three stars.

To summarize: I use the new playlist to listen to the new tracks, and when I’ve heard what I want to from a track I simply give it three stars; when I revisit the list the track is no longer there. If I change my mind I can still easily find it through the New Podcast playlist.

I use my nano mainly to listen to podcasts. For various reasons that aren’t important here, I prefer to download them as files directly from their sites, rather than from the iTunes Store.

I use a smart playlist to transfer the latest ones to the iPod. I couldn’t figure out a way to have that playlist know that I’d already listened to enough of a particular podcast on the iPod that I no longer wanted it to sync to it.

Then I decided to use the ratings stars. When I’m on the go and I decide I’m done with a track and don’t want it on the iPod any more, I rate it with three stars. Next time I sync those three stars appear on the Mac, and the next sync takes the track off the iPod because of the rule in the screenshot above.

There’s probably a more elegant solution than this that I’m just not seeing. This works for now. Any suggestions?