Score 1 for iTunes AAC!

Related link: http://www.apple.com.itunes/

Getting ready for my day-long drive down to NAMM, I’ve been using iTunes 6.0.2 to burn some podcasts to CD, and I stumbled across some cool features. One of the podcasts, Spacemusic episode 31, was an AAC file with 16 embedded chapter markers. I figured it would transfer to audio CD as one unnavigable 65-minute track, but iTunes actually split it into 16 tracks. Excellent! (It would be even cooler if the program could export the names and durations of the chapters—or print them as a CD cover—but there’s always next rev.)

Ironically, Spacemusic switched back to MP3 format shortly after that podcast because so many listeners were unable or unwilling to play AAC files. Perhaps the MP3 spec will get a chaptering function eventually. The show’s host now provides section start times in the podcast’s description tag, so it wouldn’t be too hard to input them through, say, AppleScript and jump directly to the segment of interest.

Actually, I’d been wanting to do that for a while, so I just modified one of the scripts from my article “Turn Your Mac into an Audio Transcriber”:

tell application "iTunes"
set desired_minutes to display dialog "Set iTunes playback position to this many minutes:" default answer "0" with icon 1
set desired_seconds to display dialog "... and this many seconds:" default answer "0" with icon 1
set goToMin to text returned of desired_minutes as number
set goToSec to text returned of desired_seconds as number
set goToPos to ((goToMin * 60) + (goToSec))
set player position to goToPos
end tell

Paste this code into Script Editor, save it as a script (the iTunes Script folder, ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts, is a convenient place), and then run it. A window will pop up, asking you to enter the minutes. Then a second window will ask for the seconds:

When you enter that number, iTunes will jump to the location you specified. With a long audio file, that’s way easier than rummaging around with the playback position slider. And in conjunction with a streamripper like Audio Hijack, you could automate the process of extracting individual songs....

Other happy iTunes discoveries, anyone?