[Pythonmac-SIG] appscript: selecting many songs in iTunes

[Niko Matsakis]

>> If this *is* just a limitation in iTunes, I have to admit I'm a  
>> bit of a loss as to how to proceed.
>
> Did you try the alternative script I suggested? How did that fare?

Well, your alternative doesn't quite do what I want.  The duplicates  
don't actually have the same database_ID: instead, there are two  
songs that have the same artist/album/tracknumber, or other  
conditions.  I did, however, come up with another possibility along  
the same lines; I've implemented it, but I haven't been able to test  
it for speed against the whole library.

What I've ended up with is something that's actually somewhat  
similar: I extract from each set of duplicates the artist name, and  
then select all songs with that artist, and their database ID.  I  
then delete the track if the database ID is in the list of IDs to kill.

But now, closer to your original suggestion, I am thinking of just  
selecting the song handle and database ID of EVERY track, once, and  
then iterating through.  After all, when I start up I load a lot of  
information about every track (artist, album, etc) this way and it's  
not *that* slow.

Well, I'll benchmark the two approaches against my full library and  
report back on the results :).  The question is whether having more  
AppleEvents will be slower than selecting way too much data.


thanks for your help,
Niko