Introduction

After about 10 years of service, I decided to retire my JukeOla project and join the rest of the world in using Apple's iTunes to manage my digital music library. JukeOla was a great success. Before iTunes (or SoundJam) even existed, we had a music server with a web-based interface that had most of the same features as iTunes, but was heavily customized for our house, our stereo, and our preferences. Of course, in moving to iTunes, we gained some features (such as album art) while losing others. It seems to us that we've gained more than we lost, so we're mostly happy with iTunes as our music server.

Mostly. There are a few features that we lost in the conversion that we miss. One of the missing features that particularly bugged me was the ability to customize what "random play" would really do. For example, we have a fairly extensive collection of Christmas music in our library. We love those songs --even the cheesey ones-- but only when they're "in season". It's very annoying to have the iTunes DJ or the general Shuffle Play feature playing Christmas carols on Arbor Day. JukeOla had built-in checks for these sorts of offenses. iTunes is not as smart.

But because we run iTunes on an Apple computer (a Mac Mini, hooked to our stereo system), we have the ability to extend its functionality a little using AppleScript. We can't modify the DJ or Shuffle Play, but we can write a script that keeps the Christmas music from playing in April.

The 2 scripts presented here do just that. Here's how they work:

• first, they assume that the holiday music you wish to control is collected in a single playlist, named "Christmas"
• there are 2 scripts; one for enabling and one for disabling every song in the "Christmas" playlist
• these scripts are then scheduled to run annually as iCal events

Requirements, Installation, and Usage

You'll need iTunes, of course. When I wrote these, we were using version 9.something. And these scripts only work on Macs. We're using OSX 10.6. You'll also need iCal (a standard part of Mac OSX) if you wish to schedule the scripts to run automatically. To use the scripts as written, you'll need to collect all of your holiday music into a single playlist called "Christmas".

To download the scripts, click on each of them and choose "save". (whatever the mac clicks are --option click?)

where to install them

Using the scripts is easy! manually, scheduled...

Feel free to customize these scripts to suit your needs. With only slight modifications, you can ensure that:

• you never hear breakup songs on your anniversary, or on Valentine's day
• you only hear Radiohead songs on odd days of the month
• songs with the word "Saturday" in the title only play on Tuesdays
• etc.