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10 Responses to "Cocoa Query: Give Me Only Checked iTunes Songs"

1. | Reply John C. Welch
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 11:10am #
   

   It's not even close to C, but if you look at the iTunes Dictionary, there's an "enabled" property for the track class:

   enabled (boolean) : is this track checked for playback?

   I'm not *sure* that this is the same as checked in iTunes, but, it wouldn't be hard to check and see if it is. It may be a good starting point to look.

2. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 11:30am #
   

   [quote comment="45079"]enabled (boolean) : is this track checked for playback?[/quote]

   Yeah, 10,000 AppleScript calls probably won't work for us. 🙂 I know it's in the dictionary… I'm just hoping it's exposed elsewhere. It's probably in the "iTunes Library" file, of course.

3. | Reply John C. Welch
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 11:50am #
   

   well, you wouldn't have to do it via AppleScript per se, although I imagine the raw event calls wouldn't be a great way to do it either. What precisely are you doing when you need the info?

4. | Reply Michael Tsai
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 12:18pm #
   

   I think you could do it quickly with one AppleScript call:

   get id of every track whose enabled is true

5. | Reply John C. Welch
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 12:44pm #
   

   Good point Michael. I think it's easy to get into the "must make a hundred individual calls" mindset with AppleScript, because with other languages, the penalty you pay for this is smaller. (Small brag moment: I ended up helping Bruce Horn out with a similar issue for a project he was working on.) With AppleScript, or even the underlying events, there's a point, and you reach it pretty quick, where you're better off asking once for a lot of data, than a thousand times for a little data.

6. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 12:54pm #
   

   [quote comment="45081"]well, you wouldn't have to do it via AppleScript per se, although I imagine the raw event calls wouldn't be a great way to do it either. What precisely are you doing when you need the info?[/quote]

   Yeah, my limited testing with AS-in-Cocoa is that it's slow regardless of the methods used.

   [quote comment="45082"]get id of every track whose enabled is true[/quote]

   That appears to work. On 11,137 tracks, this script:

   tell application "iTunes"
       set timeStamps to "Start: " & (current date) & return
       set allTracks to id of every track in user playlist id 25572 whose enabled is true
       set timeStamps to timeStamps & "End:   " & (current date)
       return timeStamps
   end tell

   Generates this output:

   Start: Friday, December 28, 2007 12:51:05 pm
   End:   Friday, December 28, 2007 12:51:05 pm

   So… yeah, that might work after all. I still have to wonder if there's not a solution that won't require creating a table/dictionary/database of songs, another for enabled tracks, then running through the latter to prune the former.

   But at least the AS method isn't as slow as I thought. Thanks!

7. | Reply David Smith
   Posted 28 Dec 2007 at 4:05pm #
   

   You can also get a bit of a speed boost (and avoid nasty NSApplescript and AS syntax) by using the scripting bridge, although at the cost of 10.4 support.

8. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
   Posted 29 Dec 2007 at 12:27pm #
   

   [quote comment="45088"]You can also get a bit of a speed boost (and avoid nasty NSApplescript and AS syntax) by using the scripting bridge, although at the cost of 10.4 support.[/quote]

   We're not too worried about 10.4 support, I don't believe.

   One other thing: iTunes must be running for this AppleScript solution to work. Other solutions seem to get the "checked" status without launching iTunes (or requiring iTunes to be running).

9. | Reply John C. Welch
   Posted 31 Dec 2007 at 4:51pm #
   

   Found it. What you have to look for is the presence of a "Disabled" key which will have a value of true. If the track is checked, the disabled key isn't there. If the track is NOT checked, then it's there.

10. | Reply Erik J. Barzeski
    Posted 31 Dec 2007 at 5:07pm #
    

    [quote comment="45125"]Found it. What you have to look for is the presence of a "Disabled" key which will have a value of true. If the track is checked, the disabled key isn't there. If the track is NOT checked, then it's there.[/quote]

    That seems to be right. Thanks! I'm not sure how I missed that earlier. 😛