If you’re like me, you’ve been slowly trying to organize your massive amount of music in your iTunes library over the past couple of years. If I’ve got 15 minutes here or there, I’ll go and get some album artwork and lyrics. The only problem is that it takes FOREVER…FORever…forever.

I’m also a huge fan of automation, I’m big on Photoshop actions to make my life easier, so when I found Doug’s Scripts for itunes, I was suitably interested. Essentially, this guy has written a shit ton of automated applescripts for iTunes and boy I found a doozy for my lyrics and album art hunger. First, you need to get “Needle Drop” and install it- what this does is let you play the tracks in your library for a specified amount of time, then move on to the next, and so on and so on.

Next step is to grab “GimmeSomeTune” from Apple’s site. This is the program that allows you to download art and lyrics for a playing song (among other things). Together, these two apps let you quickly run through your library and download the lyrics and artwork if the song doesn’t have any.

Here’s what to do:

1. Install Needle Drop – just follow the directions
2. Run GimmeSomeTune, you’ll see a musical note show up in your menu bar
3. Click that music note and choose “Preferences” and click on the “Artwork/Lyrics” button
4. Click the “Fetch Cover Artwork…” checkbox (I chose to keep the album art with the audio file. Not sure the difference, other than increased file size, which at current storage prices really doesn’t matter)
5. Click the “Fetch Lyrics…” checkbox
6. Close the Preferences window
7. Look for the “S” logo between the Window and Help menus in iTunes – that’s where you access the Needle Drop script (and any other scripts for that matter). Click it and select Needle Drop
8. Choose “6″ seconds for the duration of the play and “0″ for the starting time.
9. Watch and enjoy.

Mines been running all day, just make sure you check on it every once in a while, the GimmeSomeTune app seems to stop running for no reason (maybe it’s sleep, I’m not sure yet). But, it’s performing as promised, very cool

********************* UPDATE 10/12 *********************

OK, I came across a bug when doing this. All of the artwork while displaying correctly in iTunes, was all wrong on the iPod. Sometimes is would match and sometime sit wouldn’t. Even on artwork I had previously set myself and for purchased items. I re-synched but that didn’t help. The solution, I found, was to restore the iPOd to the factory settings (just dock the iPod, select it in the left hand column in iTunes, and click “Restore” on the Summary page). That did the trick!

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