Mp3 Prelistening Maker

Ceate mp3 audio excerpts using iTunes.

By Milan

30.06.2006

When thinking of the further development of the trinity of Lado’s web empire (lado.de, ladoshop.de, ladotunes.com) we were confronted with the need of building a digital audio archive. After discussions with Carol, the CEO of Lado, we decided that one core feature should be the ability to broadcast audio excerpts anytime we’re dealing with record releases. The following goals were made:

  1. Provide a productive way to create audio excerpts.
  2. Integrate it seamlessly in the established workflow.
  3. Ensure that id3 tags are setup fine.

We did a quick google on that, but the results turned out not to satisfy us:

  • There’s a bunch of free encoding/ripping tools, but they lacked support for creating excerpts.
  • Other software solutions were way to expensive (approx. 300$) for beeing used solely to solve this specific problem.

One other thing to notice was that the whole label is dealing with Macs in their daily business, so we started considering iTunes as it ships with every new mac. Some searches later we noticed Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes, a fine ressource if you consider extending the functionality of iTunes.

So we started hacking our first iTunes AppleScript Plugin using Mac OS X Script Editor: MP3 Prelistening Maker.

What it does

  1. Extract 45 seconds from 0:45 to 1:30, if your songs are shorter than 1:30, the markers are moved to the start of the song.
  2. Convert to mp3.
  3. Append the word prelistening to the the track and the album name in your id3 tags.

Installation

  1. Quit iTunes.
  2. Unzip the archive using the built in Mac OS X unzipper.
  3. Copy its contents to yourusername/library/iTunes/Scripts/
  4. If the folder Scripts doesn’t exist, create it.

Usage

  1. Select the songs you want to process:
  2. You’ll notice a new AppleScript icon in your iTunes menu bar, click it and choose Mp3 Prelistening Maker:
  3. The scripts starts processing your tracks:

Further thinking

The script is far away from beeing finished, but for now it does what it’s supposed to do. One could improve it’s functionality in several ways:

  • Process the songs at once, copy them to temporary playlist first. That finished converting sound becomes pretty annoying after a while.
  • Ensure that Filenames are websafe for further usage.
  • Ensure that the Bitrate ist set to 128kps/static so they are usable in other applications, e.g. a flash movie that makes them playable on the web.
  • Delete the Prelistenings from your library and move them to a specified directory. In our case that’d be an internal file server at our office network.

Download

Use at your own risk and have fun. If you have any suggestions, modifications or improvements we are lucky to hear from you.

Update & Interact

The end is near, now what to do?

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