January 16, 2008

Applescript for deleting original songs in iTunes

Posted by Eric at 12:52 pm | Category: Technology

Annoyed that if you see a song in an iTunes playlist and you hit “delete”, it’ll only disappear from the playlist and not the library? Dislike having to go and hunt for the file in your actual library to delete it?

My expanding iTunes library has made me write this Applescript (oh, the horror!) that’ll delete the original songs from the iTunes library if you select a song in a playlist. Installation and usage instructions are in the Readme file, and I’ve zipped the whole thing.

Note, of course, that this script only works on Macs…

UPDATE: Apparently, there’s a not-well-documented keyboard shortcut for deleting songs from the library straight from the playlist. Instead of hitting “delete”, the keystroke is Opt-delete. Thanks to manduca for the tip!

Follow the comments thread by the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Applescript for deleting original songs in iTunes”

  1. manduca Says:
    January 17th, 2008 at 10:50 am

    hi -

    just found your blog. always nice to read other grad student stuff.

    i recently came across the same prob. turns out there’s a keyboard shortcut: option-delete. first it will ask if you want to delete it from your playlist (or maybe library). if you say yes, it will ask if you want to delete it from your hard drive.

    also, have you seen doug’s applescript site? vast. excellent. dougscripts.com/itunes/index.php

    happy parafilm.

  2. Eric Says:
    January 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm

    Ah; thanks for the shortcut.

    I actually based my script off of one of Doug’s scripts. I had been wondering why he didn’t make a script for this function…now I know!

    Oh well, I learned some new AppleScript syntax, at least.

Leave a Reply