MacOS Automator workflow to populate iTunes info from file path

Just in case someone has the same need, here is an Automator workflow to update the metadata of a music (or video) file based on the file’s path (for non-Mac users, Automator is a graphical task automation tool in MacOS).

Here the context: I recently bought my first Mac, a home desktop. That’s where my MP3 reside now, carefully arranged in folders by artist name. I made sure to plop them in the default “Music” folder, to make  iTunes happy. Or so I thought, until I actually started iTunes and saw it attempt to copy every single MP3 file in its own directory. Pretty stupid, but easily fixed via a config setting. The next issue is that, within iTunes, you cannot organize your music based on the directory structure. All it cares about is the various metadata fields. You can’t even display the file name or the file path in the main iTunes window.

Leave it to Apple to create a Unix operating system which hates files.

The obvious solution is to dump iTunes and look for a better music player. But there’s another problem.

Apparently music equipment manufacturers have given up on organizing your digital music and surrendered that function to Apple (several models let you plug an SD card or a USB key, but they don’t even try to give you a decent UI to select the music from these drives). They seem content to just sell amplifiers and speakers, connected to an iPod doc. Strange business strategy, but what do I know. So I ended up having to buy an iPod Classic for my living room, even though I have no intention of ever taking it off the dock.

And the organization in the iPod is driven by the same metadata used by iTunes, so even if I don’t want to use iTunes on the desktop I still have to somehow transfer the organization reflected in my directory structure into Apple’s metadata fields. At least the artist name; I don’t care for albums, albums mean nothing. And of course I’m not going to do this manually over many gigabytes of data.

The easy way would be to write a Python script since apparently some kind souls have written Python modules to manipulate iTunes metadata.

But I am still in my learn-to-use-MacOS phase, so I force myself to use the most MacOS-native solution, as a learning experience. Which took me to Automator and to the following workflow:

OK, I admit it’s not fully MacOS-native, I had to escape to a shell to run a regex; I couldn’t find a corresponding Automator action.

I run it as a service, which can be launched either on a subfolder of “Music” (e.g. “Leonard Cohen”) or on a set of files which are in one of these subfolders. It just picks the name of the subfolder (“Leonard Cohen” in this case) and sets that as the “artist” in the file’s metadata.

Side note: this assumes you Music folder is “/Users/vbp/Music”, you should replace “vbp” with your account user name.

For the record, there is a utility that helps you debug workflows. It’s “/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs”. I started the workflow by making it apply to “iTunes files” and later changed it to work on “files and folders”. And yet it didn’t show up in the service list for folders. Running “pbs -debug” showed that my workflow logged NSSendFileTypes=(“public.audio”); no matter what. Looks like a bug to me, so I just created a new workflow with the right input type from the start and that fixed it.

Not impressed with iTunes, but I got what I needed.

[UPDATE]

I’ve improved it a bit, in two ways. First I’ve generalized the regex so that it can be applied to files in any location and it will pick up the name of the parent folder. Second, I’m now processing files one by one so that they don’t all have to be in the same folder (the previous version grabs the folder name once and applies it to all files, the new version retrieves the folder name for each file). This way, you can just select your Music folder and run this service on it and it will process all the files.

It’s pretty inefficient and the process can take a while if you have lots of files. You may want to add another action at the end (e.g. play a sound or launch the calculator app) just to let you know that it’s done.

In the new version, you need to first create this workflow and save it (as a workflow) to a file:

Then you create this service which references the previous workflow (here I named it “assign artist based on parent folder name”). This service is what you invoke on the folders and files:

I haven’t yet tried running more than one workflow at a time to speed things up. I assume the variables are handled as local variables, not global, but it was too late at night to open this potential can of worms.