ITunes Organization
Ok, I don't know about everyone else out there, but I have a large number of songs in my music library. I like most of them, but not all of them, and sometimes I am looking for a particular type of song.
So in general I try to rate each song with 1 - 5 start (5 being the best) and I try to comment on each song in a del.icio.us sort of way. So I might place the following comments on a live version of the song "Lover Lay Down" by DMB, "live, love song, chill, romantic, relaxing".
Unfortunately, to do this I have to open up ITunes, select the right number of stars, double click the comments area and enter my comments. Personally this was totally absurd, so I looked for a way to automate the process. Didn't take long for me to find one: http://projects.nateweiss.com/nwdc/itunes/scripts/ has a sample of a jsscript that lets you talk to ITunes and manipulate everything. He also has some links to the API and some instructions for creating shortcuts to easily access the scriptlets.
Using this information I created the following scripts. In the zip you'll find a number of .js files and a number of .bat files. The bat files include:
1) Rate1.bat
2) Rate2.bat
3) Rate3.bat
4) Rate4.bat
5) Rate5.bat
6) CommentTrack.bat
The rating scripts basically let you assign a shortcut to a specific star rating (in my case I went a step further and assigned a quick key to the functionality). So all I need to do is hit one key and the correct star is assigned to the song, without ever opening ITunes.
CommentTrack.bat runs a script that pops up a box that you can enter comments into. You enter the comments, hit ok and the comments are automatically assigned to the song, again without opening ITunes.
Both of these have helped me organize my songs much more efficiently. Now if I want to listen to some relaxing music I just create a SmartFolder that contains all songs with "relaxing" in their comments.
If you have any questions about this just toss me an email or comment below and I'll help you out with it. There may be bugs, as this has not been extensively tested at all. It is very simple though, so it should work fine.
So in general I try to rate each song with 1 - 5 start (5 being the best) and I try to comment on each song in a del.icio.us sort of way. So I might place the following comments on a live version of the song "Lover Lay Down" by DMB, "live, love song, chill, romantic, relaxing".
Unfortunately, to do this I have to open up ITunes, select the right number of stars, double click the comments area and enter my comments. Personally this was totally absurd, so I looked for a way to automate the process. Didn't take long for me to find one: http://projects.nateweiss.com/nwdc/itunes/scripts/ has a sample of a jsscript that lets you talk to ITunes and manipulate everything. He also has some links to the API and some instructions for creating shortcuts to easily access the scriptlets.
Using this information I created the following scripts. In the zip you'll find a number of .js files and a number of .bat files. The bat files include:
1) Rate1.bat
2) Rate2.bat
3) Rate3.bat
4) Rate4.bat
5) Rate5.bat
6) CommentTrack.bat
The rating scripts basically let you assign a shortcut to a specific star rating (in my case I went a step further and assigned a quick key to the functionality). So all I need to do is hit one key and the correct star is assigned to the song, without ever opening ITunes.
CommentTrack.bat runs a script that pops up a box that you can enter comments into. You enter the comments, hit ok and the comments are automatically assigned to the song, again without opening ITunes.
Both of these have helped me organize my songs much more efficiently. Now if I want to listen to some relaxing music I just create a SmartFolder that contains all songs with "relaxing" in their comments.
If you have any questions about this just toss me an email or comment below and I'll help you out with it. There may be bugs, as this has not been extensively tested at all. It is very simple though, so it should work fine.
posted by The Entreprexplorer | 11:23 AM
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