Batch listening

[elliotbay]

A while ago, I downloaded the 1-1000 and 1001-1500 sets through BitTorrent with the intent of eventually listening to all OCR contributions, deciding on the fly which ones to import to my iTunes library. There were a couple of problems doing this manually, however. First, I didn't want to listen to these in alphabetical order, and I don't trust my clicker to open things randomly. Second, whenever I import a song to my iTunes library, I generally make a few changes to the tags (No offense to the decision makers, but I generally want the track title to be, y'know, just the title of the track.)

Anyway, as a programmer at heart, I naturally scripted this process, and now that the script is relatively stable, I thought I'd offer it to anyone else who perhaps has the same need. It runs under OS X, and is written in Python with a dollop of system calls and AppleScript to interact with the QuickTime and iTunes application. It currently does the following when you run the script:

Prints the number of songs you have yet to listen to.

Repeats the following as long as there are songs left:

Plays a random song in QuickTime, printing its (current) title

if you type 'n', it moves the song to the trash

if you type 'y', it does the following:

asks which is the final word in the song's game name

edits the id3 tag such that the title is the song's name, and the album is the game name (removing OC ReMix)

imports the song into iTunes

moves the song to the trash

There are some other bookkeeping things it does with AppleScript to eliminate clutter in QuickTime windows, and change focus back to the terminal.

Anyway, if anyone's interested, I'd be glad to share it. I'll need to change a few things so it could be used with anybody's setup, but no point if nobody wants it. If I don't get too many takers, I could customize it to taste.