Save Tracks from the New iTunes Store in Playlists
I’ve long used the iTunes Store to tag my classical music after ripping, if the information from the Gracenote database was insufficient (which is often the case). I wrote about how to do this in this Macworld article from last year. This involves saving the tracks to a playlist, then using an AppleScript to copy information from the tracks.
But with iTunes 9, the iTunes Store layout is different, and you can’t copy tracks to a playlist to do the above trickery. Well, it turns out there is a way, and it took AppleScript maven Doug Adams to figure it out. I e-mailed Doug, and, after scratching his head for a while, he came up with the trick: copy the tracks when in iTunes Store Browse mode. While this means that you need to know the artist name – which, for classical music, can depend on a number of elements – you can still use the AppleScript I mentioned in the article for tagging. If you don’t know how the artist is listed in the iTunes Store, look it up first in the Store, then switch to Browse mode (press Command-B to do this), then drill down until you find it.
I’ve used this trick for tagging, but, as Doug mentions, you can also use it to save tracks to a playlist to use as a kind of wishlist.
