• January 8th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Apple
  • Music

If you hold all of your music on an external drive and move it around a bit to keep it organized like me inevitably you will get broken/dead/missing tracks in your iTunes library. It’s not a big deal to neglect instead of say when you plug in you iPod and that track is needed when syncing and you get this annoying prompt.

I used to use the Super Remove Dead Tracks v2.0 applescript to cure these ailments, but with iTunes 7.5 the applescript breaks and it hasn’t been updated since April 2007 so for all intents and purposes it is dead.

With some research I found Paul Mayne’s solution which involved a mashup of smart and static playlists and removing the remainder, but this didn’t work for me either because the process that should have filtered out the missing tracks just didn’t happen, but it did grease the wheels.

So I put my thinking cap on and found this ghetto-savvy way of doing it.

1. Go to your full library and select all of your tracks.
2. Get Info - CMD I
3. Set all of your files to have an obscure ID3 tag that you never use - say BPM to an arbitrary number.
4. Wait for all the tags to process - this may take a while depending on the size of your library.
5. Go to Library > Music
6. Sort by BPM (or your chosen arbitrary ID3 tag) - Change view options to add that (BPM) column if it is not showing: CMD J
7. Select Tracks with no BPM set
8. Remove them from your library.

This is a pain in the ass I know, but like I said it’s a ghetto solution. Hopefully Doug will update his Super Remove Dead Tracks script for 7.5 - but if you ask me this is something that Apple should handle on their own.

Does anyone have a better way of cleaning out the junk?

UPDATE Looks like Doug has updated Super Dead Tracks to ver 2.1. Grab it - it’s the best method.

Popularity: 13% [?]

• January 1st, 2008
• Filed in
  • Blog
  • Rants

I don’t know whether I have been avoiding sticking my foot in my mouth, or just plain uninterested in most things, but one of my resolutions for 2008 is to break my awful habit of lurking around.

Most of my interaction with my development/designer colleagues has been face to face when I attend SXSW, but that interaction quickly dies off shortly after my visit to Austin every year. The problem is entirely my own fault - I’m just bad at keeping in touch - something I need to work on. But I’m not attending SXSW in ‘08 for the first time in 3 years, my only option is to put myself “out there”.

I’ve been lurking my whole career and I need a change. I want to increase the readership of somedirection and the only way to do that is to crawl out of this little cave I’ve built for myself on the Internet. One of the first places I’m starting this “coming out party” is in the successful 9rules community run by a pair of my SXSW friends Mike Rundle and Paul Scrivens. There’s a lot of things I’m excited about in 2008 and the wheels are in motion for this to be a great year.

So I welcome my readers, speak up! Quit hiding! Become involved. Let’s get a salad of comments going here!

Popularity: 4% [?]