First of all, I want to remind everyone that these are all Mac only. Sorry PC folks. That being said, here are a few of the really useful scripts that I use every day to beef up I-tunes and help manage my dj collection. Please send me more of your own favorites, and I will post them here!
LAME Import!
LAME is widely considered to be the highest quality MP3 encoding algorithm in the business. Unfortunately its not the easiest thing in the world to use because its not a program, just a bunch of really great settings that have to be wrapped in another program. This generally scares away most users, but it should not! Download this script and you can use the best encoder in the business right inside itunes. You will have to do a little web research to find the names for different settings but there are easily found with a great break down of what’s good HERE>> at the Hydrogen Audio forums.
Music Store Player
This one is HUGE! One of my favorite scripts.its really very simple, it automatically plays songs displayed in itunes in order. Problem: You have to manually click on a song and listen to it in the music store. Very tedious if you are listening to a lot of music.
Solution: turn on the music player script, open up a great playlist or an Imix and just let the clips play in the background while you work. Once a song catches your ear, grab it.
Find Album ART with AMAZON or GOOGLE
These are straight forward searches that take you to the respected sites and pull up any available album art work. Its your responsibility to then drag the pictures file into your mp3. Want it automated? Read further.
Album art while you sleep.
First, we need to create a play list containing all the tracks with no art work. You can do that with THIS script or THIS script.
now, I am a bit embarrassed. I cant seem to find one of the scripts I used, but I swear it works great and the concept is simple. A combination of 2 scripts, one that pulls in album art automatically from Amazon for the selected track and a 2nd that automatically plays the songs in your collection at short intervals. I cant find the auto import program/script for the life of me but in the past year both Itunes and Amazon have made their album cover databases less accessible, so its possible it went away. The auto play script is called Needle Drop and can be found HERE>>
So, an alternative can be found here: its called artie and finds album art work via your XML file. I don’t know how well it works so give it a try.
Here is a Mac program that does the same thing basically but without the XML file. DOWNLOAD
Find Song Names and info for albums without the CD Search CDDB to get song info when you don’t have the original album or know the names.
Remove missing tracks from hard drive
Surveys iTunes for tracks that are no longer available on the local drive (as indicated by a “!” next to their names) and removes them. Any playlists that subsequently contain no tracks will then be deleted. Progress is displayed every 500 tracks. This is a more radical version of Remove Dead Tracks.
Archive Songs
This script will create a .zip archive of the files of the selected tracks. The .zip file is similar to that created by the Finder’s “Create Archive” File command, and can be un-archived with a double-click. Usefull for storing songs you don’t want to play but want to keep around for later.
