itunes – Nothing to See Here

New iPods today

Gizmodo is running a live blog of the new Apple iPod announcements today. Interesting reading. Quick rundown:

New iPod Shuffle – price lowered to $79 for 1GB
New iPod Nano – thinner, slightly wider. $149 and $199 for 4GB and 8GB
New iPod Classic – basically the same as existing iPods, but thinner and cheaper. $299 and $349 for 80GB and 160GB!
New iPod Touch – essentially, its an iPhone without the phone part. It has Wi-fi web surfing and iPod capabilities and the same interface as the iPhone. Also can buy songs directly from the iTunes music store. Downside: 8GB and 16GB for $299 and $399. I can’t see paying that much more and giving up all that space just for that somewhat annoying interface.
iPhone gets ringtones – They’re adding the ability to turn your purchased songs into ringtones… for 99 cents per song. This really sucks, basically you buy the song for 99 cents and then pay an extra 99 cents to turn any 30 second section of it into a ringtone. And it only works with songs you buy from iTunes and even then only 500k of their catalog can do it, not just any song. Really lame and one more reason not to get an iPhone, IMO.
iPhone also gets ability to buy direct from iTunes music store.
Starbucks integration – When you get the new iPod Touch or iPhone near a Starbucks, it’ll have a special menu to let you see the last 10 songs played there, and allow you to purchase them from iTunes.
iPhone price drop – The 4GB version is now gone, the 8GB version drops 200 bucks to $399. The price drop was required, IMO, but anybody who bought early kinda got screwed. Especially if they got the 4GB model, not only are they out $100 extra, but also out 4GB. Bummer for you suckers!

Seems to me that the price drops across the board make sense. Most excellent news, IMO, is the reasonably priced 160GB iPod classic. I really want one of those. The iPhone price drop is likely to try to stave off competition from the upcoming Google Phone. The iPod touch just seems somewhat worthless to me, but then I dislike the iPhone interface concept to begin with. Touchscreens are not my favorite things.

Still, neat stuff. Take a look at the many pictures Gizmodo posted on the live blog, some of them are quite cool.

Edit: Apple now has info about the new iPod’s up on their site: http://www.apple.com/

iTunes Explicit Lyrics tagging

Over in the comments of my EvilLyrics post, somebody asked for this script. It seems like people might find it handy, so here you go: explicit.txt

It will search the lyrics of all the songs in iTunes for “bad words” and flag those tracks as Explicit by adding the word “Explicit” to the end of the comments in the track.

Now, I have no use for this personally, but I can see where some people might. One thing you will have to do in order to use it is to edit it and define what you consider to be a “bad word”. Just after halfway through the script, there’s a section that looks like this:

badword1|badword2|badword3

Just add as many words as you like, then run it like all the rest of these iTunes Javascripts. It’s reasonably smart and won’t tag a track as Explicit if the word Explicit is already in the comments.

You could use this for Smart Playlists, to make “clean” playlists, or to make “not so clean” playlists. Whatever you like. You could do that without this script too, but this makes it a bit easier.

iTunes SaveRatings Script

Made this useful little doo-hickey a while back. It lets you save and restore the ratings from iTunes. Handy for moving stuff around from machine to machine.

http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/SaveRatings.zip

iTunes Javascripts

Somebody on digg mentioned AppleScripting iTunes on the Mac, but it seems to be less well known that you can write Javascripts or VBScripts for iTunes for Windows.
So, here’s a bunch of scripts I’ve written for various tasks:

Creates a playlist of all the songs in the library with no artwork: http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/NoArtPlaylist.txt
Creates a playlist of all the songs in the library with no lyrics: http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/NoLyricsPlaylist.txt
Creates a playlist of all the songs in the library of which you only have one of them by that artist (one hit wonders): http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/onehitwonders.txt
Imports lyrics from EvilLyrics’ into iTunes: http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/EvilLyricsImport.txt
Removes all lyrics from all songs in your library: http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/ClearLyrics.txt
Reload/update all songs in the library from the file tags (useful if you use another tagging program to make changes to tags): http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/update.txt
Finds dead tracks in your library and makes a list of them: http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/FindDeadTracks.txt
Removes dead tracks from your library (this one was actually written by Apple originally, I’m just including it for completeness): http://ottodestruct.com/itunes/RemoveDeadTracks.txt

I’ve written more, but these are the most general purpose ones.

To use any of them, just download them, rename them to a *.js file, then run them like any other program (double click, select and press enter, type the name from a command prompt, etc). If you have all the defaults in XP or have the Windows Scripting Host installed on other Windows boxes, then the wscript.exe program actually runs the scripts, much like cmd.exe runs batch files. Same idea, anyway. The scripts connect to iTunes as a COM object and use it in that fashion. Works really well and is quite handy for scripting tasks in iTunes. Yeah, it doesn’t actually integrate or anything, but it’s still useful.