Get rid of artwork at top of playlist?

Big Sur, eh? I used to keep old versions of apps tucked away somewhere. Since my iTunes 7 ran on anything that could run 32 bit (it was running on my 2012 iMac), I wonder if I could get Catalina or Monterey onto one of my old machines and, uh, borrow the media player from then. I can't remember when iTunes 7.5 came out but I may have kept it going for almost 20 years? (Not being interested in Apple Music and not caring about iPhone syncing I saw no need for running anything higher.) I actually had two versions of iTunes on my High Sierra Mac and I just made sure to set it to never open any media by default with iTunes and I only started iTunes using my Dock icon which pointed to my iTunes 7.

Oh, the other way to get more lines is to go to Music preferences and there's a setting there for closer lines. The problem is, the font starts to get a teeny bit small.

My 2012 iMac is sitting on the floor right now and I know it will run up to Catalina...

Yeah, I use Songs view 99.9% of the time

Songs is the indeed the most usable view but I think if you want to copy to an arranged play order you have to use a playlist. On a few occasions I have ended up with a list of tracks with no track numbers. I can use a script to assign track numbers to a series of tracks but they have to be in the correct order which likely won't meet with any of the sort options in Songs (few artists have their tracks ordered alphabetically). I also used to work with playlists that had a hundred or more tracks. Now I will get to view them a tiny bit at a time. Like reading a newspaper covered with a sheet of paper with a 3"x4" hole cut in it that I have to move around.

What is making this even worse is Music couldn't import my old iTunes library. I have all the files but I am going to have to rebuild the entire library structure from scratch, including ratings.

Yeah, it didn't let me start a Catalina version of Music. Retroactive stopped working with my version of Sequoia. I looked at a bunch of alternative media players but they were either buggy, had a steep learning curve (FooBar2000), or were simply missing some important feature such as being able to edit media tags. Swinsian looked promising but then I noticed nothing had been done with it or its site in many years which made me wonder if when Apple goes Silicon coding exclusively, if it will join my 32 bit apps in the big Trash in the sky and not be worth paying for at this stage.

So back to Music. I dragged in the folder that had my collection of audio files and for some reason it ended up creating about 20 playlists which were each individual albums in my collection. I dragged the files to the Library area of the sidebar. So I guess Music is also buggy. And yes, I am definitely noticing other things missing from features. You can no longer drag a tag from one field to another to get it to copy.

VLC is a Swiss Army knife of the media players but isn't designed for a proper library with playlists, artwork, detailed breakdown of tags, etc.

I added all my Music to the Music app yesterday. Of course some which definitely do have artwork embedded (Get Info > Artwork) do not show the artwork in the artwork column.

Editing artwork is a royal pain. Gone is where you simply clicked on a track in the main window and a small box appeared at the lower left. You could either drag artwork there or copy it from a webpage source and paste it there. Copy and paste don't work, and to drag it you have to go to Get Info and then Artwork instead of no need to open any other windows.

Get Info has a File tab but it no longer shows you the actual name or directory structure to the file being used.

This morning I had left my computer on overnight and went downstairs. Got out my hearing aids which have bluetooth capability. About half an hour later I heard a broken up signal that sounded like music was being played. I went upstairs and Music was busy playing and piping audio to my hearing aids despite last night I had been using my plugged in headphones. I stopped Music, set audio out to headphones and went back downstairs. Half an hour later again broken music. Went upstairs and the Music app was playing music and piping it to my hearing aids via Bluetooth. This time I quit the app entirely and disabled Bluetooth on my computer. Silence since.

No, we don't have poltergeists.

Add on, the scroll bar on the right side of Songs view keeps on disappearing. I have to click on a different view such as Albums and then click on Songs again to get it to reappear. This is the first time in 30 years I have been able to say with good conscience that Apple's software has a bug (and one I bump into frequently).

Issue of file location information not being available without actually using the Show in Finder command (and then closing the window again) is solved by this script, courtesy of AI (well, actually my combining two scripts and making the result more presentable):

tell application "Music"
	try
		set selectedTracks to selection
		if (count of selectedTracks) is equal to 1 then
			set firstTrack to item 1 of selectedTracks
			-- Get the location of the current track
			set theTrackLocation to location of firstTrack
			
			-- Convert the location (alias) to a POSIX path (text format)
			set thePOSIXPath to POSIX path of theTrackLocation
			
			-- Extract the directory path
			set theDirectory to (do shell script "dirname " & quoted form of thePOSIXPath)
			
			-- Extract the filename
			set theFileName to (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of thePOSIXPath)
			
			-- Display the information in a dialog
			display dialog "Directory: " & return & theDirectory & return & return & "Filename: " & return & theFileName with title "Highlighted Track Location Information"
		else if (count of selectedTracks) is greater than 1 then
			display dialog "Please select only one track."
		else
			display dialog "No track is selected."
		end if
	end try
end tell

ed2345 wrote:

Not sure when that change was introduced. However, when looking for a file, I generally use right-click, Show in Finder.

I am not looking for the file as such but sometimes I am provided with a folder that has the album and artist information in its name, and files that are just numbers. If there are no embedded tags, adding these to Music results in a track that may simply have the track number as a name and that's it. Using the Finder method I have to open the folder then navigate to the enclosing folder, copy the information in the folder title, then close the window. The Applescript I provide saves all that navigating. Select a track and run the script from the list at the top of Music. You can then simply highlight the information you want and then copy and paste it. It also shows you the full path name for a quick check as to where the folder may be located (I do not let Music manage my files). I had considered making a script that would set the information in a tag such as Comments or Destination, but I only need this information when I notice some anonymous track "02" at the bottom of my songs list.

Thanks tt2! I'll check it for ideas. Unfortunately my files may originate from multiple sources with no standard formatting so I tend to just let any that have no embedded tags just enter the file name into the title tag and then deal with them from there. I have never let iTunes organize my collection so they definitely do not fit Apple's standard folder pattern.

I am close to finishing a script that will do the opposite of yours, namely re-naming files based on tags you select. You can select the ones you want (from a list of about 6) and that order is used in the file name. I've used " - " as the delimiter. I guess I could add options but I don't really see the need right now. I'm at the point right now where I'd like to add a checkbox or something where if you want to you can preview each name before committing to changing the existing one. The script isn't bulletproof but frankly I don't know if anybody else but me will use it. I just want to put in that option in case I encounter one of those tracks where the name would end up being ridiculously long. On the other hand if I am renaming 80 files I don't want to have to keep on clicking "continue" on all of them. I'm not sure if there's a radio button feature on the new Applescript. My scripting capabilities are largely reverse-engineering and then re-engineering bits of scripts. :-) I have actually found Google AI can make a headstart. However, it often uses things that no longer appear to be supported in modern Applescript and then I have to either find out how things are done now (not always easy) or come up with some cumbersome workaround (some scripts have an embarrassing number of IF statements).

I have a bunch of other scripts I have completed. Some duplicate some of what Dougscripts do, but may be more customized for my needs such as defaulting to feature selections I use most often. And of course there's no reminders to donate or pay. ;-) Not as polished, of course, and I suspect his coding is better (you can't actually see into any of the scripts issued in the past 8 years or so)…

Very few of my files are WAV. I am transitioning from iTunes 7.5 to Music on Sequoia and iTunes 7 couldn't do WAV (or FLAC, or HE-AAC)) so I had long ago re-coded the few WAV files I have.