Geek Talk: Scripts

I know you will probably dismiss this as geek talk, but let me tell you, I just discovered how to use apple scripts and wow. They are something else. I've always wondered about them, but I dismissed it as too much tech wizardry. Honestly, it is pretty simple and I'm a stooge for not looking into this before.

Why I had to do this: I recently cleared my desktop of all itunes music to make space for a project. When I no longer needed the space, I copied all my songs off my ipod using Senuti. Now I had the files on my comp (actually on an external HD) but I couldn't connect them to the old itunes library because they weren't in exactly the same place.

So I created a folder and chose "Attach a folder Action." I then get to pick from a list of scripts. Each script is a series of automated actions which automatically do things to whatever file you put into that folder (like rotate images, organize, move or change files). I downloaded a script to 'add items to itunes library' and I enabled this script for the folder. Then, all I had to do was drop the homeless files into the new, script-enabled folder and the script automatically opened itunes and started copying all the files into the library. The script can then delete all the files that are duplicated (though I'm going to do this by hand). So much easier than opening each folder and selecting all files and choosing 'open.'

So there you have it.