This site is the online companion to my book/DVD, "The Macintosh iLife '05", published by Peachpit Press and Avondale Media. If you like this site, you'll love the book and its nearly three-hour DVD-Video disc. Learn more. Have news, tips, comments, or links? Send them along! How to contact me. Get an iLife. Get your own copy of "The Macintosh iLife '05". Patronize your local bookstore or buy from Amazon for just $23.09 (34 percent off). Learn more about the book and DVD. Find out what all the buzz is about: view samples of this beautiful book and watch QuickTime excerpts from the DVD. Upcoming Appearances June 21. Apple Store, San Francisco, 6 pm June 25. Northeast Ohio Apple Corps, 9 am July 23. iLife seminar, Santa Rosa, CA Photo gallery. I love the Flickr photo sharing service; here are some recent shots. (Newsreader users: To subscribe to my photostream, drag this link into your newsreader.)

Follow-Up on iTunes Song "Cropping" -- The AppleScript Answer

After yesterday's dispatch about iTunes song cropping (see below), I received an email from Doug Adams, the proprietor of the must-visit Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes site.

Doug's site has AppleScripts for every imaginable iTunes task, and for some unimaginable ones. And, it turns out, he has two scripts that work with iTunes' Start Time and Stop time attributes to automate the cropping process.

A script named Player Position to Start or Stop sets the Start Time or Stop Time of the currently loaded track to the time of the paused player position. Pause a tune, run the script, and you've saved yourself a trip to the Get Info dialog box. Lovely.

A second script goes one step further. Copy as MP3 from Start to Stop makes an MP3 copy of the selected track, using its Start and Stop times as the beginning and ending of the new file. It even provides the option to name the new track and file. (As Doug wisely points out, this process compresses already-compressed audio, so it will degrade quality somewhat.)

You've got iTunes chores, Doug has AppleScripts.

How to "Crop" Songs with iTunes

Scenario #1: You have an album that was recorded live, and each song starts with a long, rambling introduction by the musician. You'd like to cut out those intros and just start with the music.

Scenario #2: There's a song you really want to like, but two thirds of the way through, it degenerates into a ear-bleeding cacophony of noise.

iTunes has a little-used feature that beautifully addresses both of these scenarios: You can "crop" a song -- lop off part of the beginning, part of the end, or both -- to hear only the part you want to hear. And this cropping is retained when you transfer the song to an iPod.

As I describe in The Macintosh iLife, it's easy.

1. Listen to the song you want to crop, and use iTunes' time display to note where the offensive portion ends or begins.

2. Select the song and choose Get Info from the File menu.

3. Click the Options tab.


4. Configure the Start Time and/or End Time boxes as needed. In the example above, I'm skipping over the first 34 seconds of the song.

Click OK when you've finished, and you're done. And if you ever do want to hear that cropped-out portion, you can do so by simply dragging the little playback diamond that appears near the top of the iTunes window.

Cropping: It isn't just for photos anymore.

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Really old stuff (before February 2003)

©2002-2005 by Jim Heid.