Jim, the best I can recommend is a smart playlist that picks (say) 100 songs by "most recently added."

ITunes doesn't interact with albums (or CDs) per se; there's no way I've found to use the smart playlist logic to select entire albums unless you supply the name of the album as one of the conditions.

Good luck!

Yeah, iTunes doesn't grok the concept of "album". It really only thinks in terms of tracks.

there's a way to do it, though. (if you don't fill in the disc # info then leave that out.)

--
match ALL of the following conditions:
[track number] [is] 1
[disc number] [is] 1

[x] limit to 100 [songs] selected by [most recently added]
--

to restrict it to cd rips, maybe add the format and bit rate you rip with to the criteria.

otherwise you could keep a playlist with all the songs you ~didn't~ rip, and use [playlist] [is not] to remove them from the above playlist.

this might not apply to everyone, but I find it very useful..

I only put the album name for FULL albums I have.
all the songs I have as singles I label as [:: singles ::] in the 'album' tag
(this way i can also easily browse my singles).

now, to create a playlist to include all the albums added in the last X weeks/days :
1. Date Added is in the last [X] weeks/days
2. Album is not [:: singles ::]
3. Live Updating of course.

now you have all the FULL albums added in the last X days - not exactly what you wanted, but close enough :)

I would also add other criteria like:
4. Genre is not Podcast
5. Genre is not Books & Spoken

hope this helps.

What I do is put 'NEW' in the comments field when I add songs in iTunes. Then just create a playlist for all songs with 'NEW' in comments.

I do manual update, so I know exactly what songs I'm adding, but you can always sort by 'date added' or something.

Then after you're through with the last batch of new songs, just go to the 'NEW' playlist, select all and delete the word from comments. **You may want to show the comments column since you might have added other comments and probably doesn't want to delete those**

It's not automatic, but it's pretty simple to use.

if you're going to do that you might as well throw them in a regular playlist instead, and remove them from that playlist when they're no longer new...?

If I do a normal playlist, I'd have to create a new playlist each time. That to me is more hassle than tagging the comments field. I really don't know why, except I can see which songs are new even in the main window.

yeah i can see how that would be useful. for the same reason, i have "date added" showing in the library, but it's probably harder to read.

BTW if you're using a mac it's pretty easy to make a script that would toggle "*NEW*" for selected tracks without overwriting other comments. i use something like this to tag songs as dupes and don't-play-at-night and stuff like that.

Thank you for the interesting comments and ideas. Chromo, when will you take pity on those of us who don't have a real computer and stop bragging about all the cool things your Mac can do?

This "NEW" comment idea could get old pretty quickly. I have 600+ songs added in the last month and that's a lot of work to toggle every one's comment back and forth.

i'm required to mention a scripting answer in case somebody DOES have a mac and wants to save themselves some repetitive work.

okay it turns out there is actually an SDK available from apple that gives information on how to talk to itunes on a windows machine, using jscript or VB or something tougher. i don't think there's a site that collects windows scripts tho and why is that? there are so many windows itunes users, and itunes as good as it is really makes some things hard to do. the COM interface must not work very well or maybe people don't like VB? i thought it was sort of useful...

here's how the *NEW* script might work on a mac.

--- smart playlist ---
match <all>:
<date added><is not in the last>[2 ]<weeks>
<comment><contains> [*NEW* ]
---

the script would then do 2 things.
1) if something is selected in itunes, add or remove *NEW* tags as approp
2) if there are any tracks in the smart playlist, strip their *NEW* tags. (if nothing is selected the script just does the housecleaning and quits)

it looks like doing this using the COM interface is really easy. you have full access to all track info and playlist info from outside if you ask itunes the right way.

chromo,

I've played with the com interface and I agree that the script you described would be ridiculously easy to implement.

That being said... I don't get the point of the script.

You're taking all songs that were NOT added in the last two weeks, and removing the *NEW* tag from them, right?

That means that the songs with the *NEW* tag are the songs that were added within the last two weeks, correct?

If that's the case, then why would one bother with this *NEW* tag rather than just make their smart playlist select songs added within the past two weeks?

Thanks!

Oh, and your comment implied that for MAC there is somewhere that collects useful iTunes scripts. Please share the location as I'd like to get ideas for things to implement with the COM interface.

Alessandro

fallsauce is the one who wants to do this. it's a little different from setting up smart or manual playlists (which i also suggested) because it acts like web page "NEW!" flags in the library and other places and it's more compact than showing the date-added in every location.

(the smart playlist in this setup acts as an easily controlled automatic off switch. instead of editing the script, just change the rules on the playlist to change when "new" goes away.)

for itunes scripts, the biggest repository is www.dougscripts.com/itunes/.

chromo,

thanks for the quick reply! I guess I understand fallsauce's New thing now.

Sfar as the applescripts... I guess I should have mentioned that I'd taken a look at dougscripts.com but unfortunatelly the scripts there are in compiled (or otherwise Apple native) format... which on a Vindoze machine I can't see.

I've gotten a couple of ideas from that site as far as things that are *possible* but it'd be much easier if there were somewhere that actually had the applescript SOURCE files.

If you have any leads for that I'd appreciate it.

Alessandro

doug's "tips & info" pages have a lot of sample code. i don't know another place that just puts the scripts out as text. applescripts are generally distributed in script form which is sort of a privileged document, partially compiled, as i understand it.

if you list which ones you want i can make up a bundle of them as text files for you to look at.

i'd love to take a look at what a *NEW* script might look like for windows. are you thinking of putting it together?

I'm not familiar with Windows Scripting, so I wrote a command line .Net application.

You can download it from:

http://www.dialisdn.net/user/adisciascio/songtag10.zip

Note that it WILL NOT be there much longer, so anyone with more permanent web space, please offer to host it :-)

Also note that since this is a .NET application it will NOT run on your computer unless you have the .Net Framework installed. You can get this for free from Microsoft.

i downloaded apple's itunes example scripts and converted them to text. also included is apple's pdf doc. itunes scripts, converted to text. original page.

(the scripts are a few years old and refer to sites that no longer work as the scripts expect them to, but the programming is still valid.)

chromo.home.mindspring.com/songtag10.zip

Another couple of reasons why you would use NEW instead of a 'songs added in the last two weeks' sort of playlist, is becasue 1) I'd been adding my whole CD collection (new iPod) and it'd just be useless, and 2) Sometimes I don't get around to listening it for quite a while.

fallsauce: have you tried the whitemiata's gizmo? (and what exactly does it do?)

chromo,

please update the songtag10.zip you posted on your site with the one now on mine. I'd not included a dll that is required on a non-development machine (the iTunes SDK dll).

Oh, and there's a readme.txt in the zip file that I think does a pretty decent job of explaining what SongTag does.

done

Sorry if this is really basic (I did try googling it, but then my head started hurting,) but how do you modify the dailytag.bat file? And when I open it, I can't input anything and it closes after about a few seconds.

you should be able to just drag it to wordpad or some other text editor like that, right? it's just a text file but that .bat extension is making it act like an app.