I spent a couple hours last night happily playing guitar and using my new Guitar Tab Search AppleScripts. So today I decided I should share a few more of the AppleScripts and programs that I use to…

Enhance iTunes

iTunes certainly has plenty of built-in features that make it the best MP3 player around, but it doesn’t quite have all of the features I need to fully make it easy to use. Here is a list of programs and AppleScripts that I use almost daily to make my music listening experience that much more enjoyable.

Note: Everything below is for Mac only.

SizzlingKeys

Download Here

I very rarely use iTunes directly as a result of having SizzlingKeys. This System Preferences add-on allows you to easily create keyboard shortcuts to all of iTunes basic functions like Play, Pause, Next, Previous, Volume, etc. So when I’m working in PhotoShop and a song comes on that I don’t want to hear, rather than switching over to iTunes to change it, I can just hit a few keys and move on with my work. It’s all fully-customizable:

SizzlingKeys allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to rating songs. I’m guessing that most people reading this never rate their songs, but it’s a great habit to get into as it allows you to create Smart Playlists of only your favorites or, more importantly, eliminate those songs that you never want to hear. Every time a song changes, I simply hit option-command and a number 1-5 to determine the number of stars I want to give a song. I’ve rated most of my music library this way.

Finally, SizzlingKeys also features a small iTunes HUD:

This semi-transparent box features all the basic song information and cover art and can either stay on-screen at all times or pop up for just a few seconds whenever the song changes. It can also be dragged to any spot on your screen.

Obtaining Cover Art

What good is displaying cover art if your music doesn’t have any? Worse yet, do you know if your music files have the art embedded or is your copy of iTunes just storing it locally?

If you’ve bought music from the Amazon MP3 store or iTunes Music Store, you should have high-resolution cover art with every song. However, anyone who has ripped an entire CD collection knows that finding good art is not easy and attaching it to individual MP3 files is even harder.

I tried a number of utilities that claimed to be able to download cover art automatically. Unfortunately, none of them worked well enough to trust. Many albums were misidentified or low-resolution cover art was grabbed. I realized that the only way to properly add cover art to albums was to do it manually.

To help in the tedious process, I used the Amazon Lookup and Search Wikipedia AppleScripts. Between these two sources, I was able to find cover art for nearly every album I owned, resorting to a manual Google Images search only on the rare occasion that both of these failed to find what I was looking for.

In addition, once you have cover art, it’s important to tell iTunes to actually embed the art into each music file. If you don’t, it will simply store the artwork separately on your computer’s hard drive and if you ever transfer your music files to another computer, your artwork won’t necessarily go with it. I use the appropriately named Embed Artwork AppleScript to accomplish this.

Share your iTunes

In the past, the common way to let friends know what you were currently listening to was to update your iChat (or other instant messenger client) status. Today, IMs are hardly used, replaced by Facebook and Twitter. So if you want to tell the world what music you’re listening to, try this:

DOWNLOAD: TwitterTrack

“TwitterTrack” is my version of this AppleScript. The original automatically updates Twitter with whatever you’re playing in iTunes. I find this to be particularly annoying. No one wants to read the title of every single song you listen to. But occasionally, you might want to blast out a quick tweet letting people know what tune you’re jamming to, so TwitterTrack lets you do just that.

You’ll need to set up a special entry in your keychain to securely give the script your Twitter username and password. To do this, run Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select File, New Password Item… and enter “twittertrack” as the name along with your Twitter login information. Don’t worry, none of this information is sent anywhere except Twitter. Upon launching the script the first time, you’ll need to allow access to the keychain.

The best way to activate this script when a song that you want to tweet comes on is to use FastScripts, which I blogged about yesterday.

If you have a favorite iTunes add-on, AppleScript, or program, tell me about it in the comments!

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