Usefull Automator Actions to Save you Time

DJ Toto, post: 1182 wrote: I’ve made myself an entire workflow for organizing my songs with this. I don’t think automator should be taught because there is no way to do something wrong and we all have different methods for organizing our stuff.

That being said, that’s a darn good tip. Automator has saved me a LOT of time over the years and if you know anything about computers you should get it to do what you want it to do.

We use it for bulk resizing images before adding them to the blog – can you go into a little more detail about the kind of uses you put it to with your music, if you can?

Phil Morse, post: 1247 wrote: We use it for bulk resizing images before adding them to the blog – can you go into a little more detail about the kind of uses you put it to with your music, if you can?

There’s no repetitive action you can’t do with Automator if you use it efficiently with Apple Scripts.

Because I use the same laptop for work, school and DJing, I have the same iTunes library for my DJ songs and everything else.

My automator action involves iTunes, Itch and Mixed In Key. Because I have a lot of other songs and playlists appart from my DJ ones, I didn’t want to integrate iTunes into Itch. What I did was create a folder where all my DJ songs are and that way it’s easy to add them to Itch, just add every file in that folder and Itch only adds the ones not already in it. Then, analyze the songs recently added.

When you analyze a song in MIK, I made it so it adds the Camelot key in the comments metadata of the song and deleted every other comment so I could easily find my DJ songs in iTunes with a smart playlist that includes every song with a comment.

So that’s my setup, to give you an idea of how I worked. Onto the Automator action:

1. I would have a playlist in iTunes that included every song I wanted to analyze with MIK and add to Itch. For example, at the end of a day of new song discovery, I would have a dozen or so songs in that playlist. The first Automator action was to take every song in that playlist and move the files to a folder I had named “Analyze”.

2. Next step was to open up Mixed in Key, point it at the “Analyze” folder and get to work on all the files in there. I would have a pop up asking me to press a button when all the files were analyzed.

3. When I pressed the button after all the files are analyzed, Automator would move them from “Analyze” to my “Itch” folder with all my DJ songs in there. Then it opened up the Itch software, waited for it to load, would go to my “Itch” folder in the file browser, select every file in there with (CMD+A) and add them to the Itch library. Then, press the Analyze files button and Voilà!

Things you should know: Some of these Automator actions relied on the mouse clicking specific places, so during these actions you can’t really use the computer to do anything else, but this was only for when MIK opened up and when Itch added the files.

This is just an example of how I do things. I recently bought a new PC so I formated my Macbook Pro because I will be using it less for some things. I now have 2 partions on my HDD, one for everything and one for DJing. My next Automator action will be quite similar in what it does but how it does it will be completely different, so just keep in mind Automator is extremely flexible and you don’t have to completely change your workflow for it to work for you. I’ve never used Platinum Notes, but I don’t think it’d be much harder to add that into Automator also.

This is great stuff! Thanks!