Apple released iTunes version 8 this week , which introduced some excellent new features , such as Genius playlists, but broke the fancy perl script that I wrote to rotate my music library on my iPod touch.

While revisiting this, I took the opportunity to re-implement it, aiming to fix a few of it's faults, most specifically the terrible performance. I decided to use Python this time around, chiefly because of the existence of appscript , an apple event bridge with a nice syntax. Python's object and sequence semantics are a slightly better fit with AppleScript's data models, and appscript should be a more optimal solution than Mac::Glue for sending lots of messages iteratively.

I've also improved the actual command recipe, using 'duplicate' rather than 'add' to build the playlist seems more efficient. Also the overhead of having to periodically build glue modules with the ' gluemac ' tool is removed. Sadly appscript isn't shipped with OS X, but installing it ( at least on Leopard ), is as simple as ' sudo easy_install appscript '.

The concept behind the tool is the same : use a nominated playlist to synchronise the albums with the iPod, and pick a random set of albums from buckets organised by album rating. Currently it's set to shuffle in 10 '2 star' albums, 20 'three star' albums, and 30 'four star' albums, selected from a 'just music' smart playlist that filters the master library, removing all spoken word, and podcasts and other miscellany from the pool.

Here's the source . I'm far less experienced at python than I am perl, so I wouldn't claim it was a particularly idiomatic solution. It does run many times more quickly than the perl / Mac::Glue solution, taking a minute or so, rather than the best part of an hour. I would put all the performance gains down to the AppleEvents bridge , appscript interface, and using more efficient apple event set operations, rather than iterating over individual data.

posted by cms on 2008-09-14 11:15:23