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

[Niko Matsakis]

Shoot, fired that last e-mail off a bit early.  Please ignore in  
favor of this more complete version.

> Depends what you're trying to get. iTunes scripting interface is  
> pretty extensive, but a lot of the implementation is rather crude  
> and many commands won't work on more than one object at a time. So  
> the above might work as-is, but it probably won't, in which case  
> you need to get a list of track references and tell iTunes to  
> delete each individually:

Okay, so this error is probably iTunes' fault?

> appscript.specifier.CommandError: Application Error -10014: Handler  
> only handles single objects.
>         Failed command: app(u'/Applications/iTunes.app').sources 
> ['Library'].playlists['Library'].tracks.filter(its.database_ID.isin 
> ([7253, 7255, 7257, 7259, 7261, 7263, 7265, 7267, 7269, 7271, 7273,  
> 7275, 7277])).get()

As you can see, I am just trying to fetch a list of references in  
this case, not delete them in one step.  Here is my python code:

	handlers = _get_tracks().filter (its.database_ID.isin (idlist)).get ()
	for handle in handlers:
		handle.delete ()

where _get_tracks() is:

	def _get_tracks ():
		return app ('iTunes').sources['Library'].playlists['Library'].tracks

Is there something wrong with what I am doing?  If I modify  
its.database_ID.isin() to be its.database_ID == id, and iterate  
through idlist, it works fine (but, as we know, slow); this makes me  
think it is correct.

If this *is* just a limitation in iTunes, I have to admit I'm a bit  
of a loss as to how to proceed.  I guess one option is just to purge  
the files themselves, and then use one of these scripts which purges  
all tracks that have no corresponding file.  Well, that or clear the  
iTunes library entirely and re-build based on the files that still  
exist.  While these two solutions would work for me, they are clearly  
hacks and I was hoping to roll this into something useful to a wider  
audience some day.


thanks again,
Niko