Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me Spring Clean my protected music
Dear Aunt TUAW,
I have a huge library of music and hundreds of songs from multiple Apple ID's. There are many songs for which I don't have the authorization anymore and need to delete them all. Is there any way to see which songs belong to which account? Do I really need to go through 30,000 songs to see which ones are playing and which ones are not??? Thank you Aunt TUAW
Your loving nephew,
Daniel
Dear Daniel,
Auntie was feeling a mite antsy and procrastinating today. Instead of going to her Liniment Abusers therapy group, she played hookey and wrote you up a utility to help you.
It's called Account Identifier and it's written in AppleScript. Because if Auntie isn't off improving herself with a dozen steps, she's deep into feeling bad about it. Nothing exemplifies self-hatred better than AppleScript. You can download a copy of the utility here.
It works like this. Search for your protected files. In Finder, do a basic search for m4p, and select the Protected MPEG-4 audio Kinds option.
Then dump batches of the files onto the Account Identifier utility. The utility scans the files (using an embedded AtomicParsley install) and lists the files and the associated account in a new TextEdit document. e.g.
File: 01 Acquired Taste
Account: auntie@tuaw.com
Path: MusicAndData:iTunes Music:Liniment:Acquired Taste
From there, it's up to you to figure out which items you want to toss.
Hugs,
Auntie T.
