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I go through a lot of music through the day – my ipod through commutes, workstations at work and home, etc. Keeping my music organized is not only necessarily but also lets me look up the right song for the right moment. So I got to thinking, why not use the social tagging concept for my mp3’s. Luckily, iTunes already has support for a mp3 tag called “Grouping”.

Searching around a bit, I found that Chris Brown had already thought of this way back in May 06. He created an applescript called TuneTag which was exactly what I was looking for. Except that I wanted to use the Grouping field instead of the more general Comments field (which I use for other purposes).

After a little bit of tweaking (actually just a search and replace), I integrated the script with Quicksilver (copy the .scpt files to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions). Once you’ve gotten that done, pull up the Quicksilver menu, hit the “.” and type your (space-separated) tags, tab over and type in “tag” to pull up the script and hit Enter.

That should start you off adding tags to your current playing song. But proper organization goes a little further. I listen (read screen) a lot of songs to see if they’re up to my *ahem* world-class quality. I usually have a smart playlist set up to only include the songs added to the collection in the last day. I go through this list, and if I like any of the songs, I add a tag (using all the stuff above) called “atc” (add to collection). The final step is to add a new smart playlist to only keep off of the “atc” tag so that you can copy these songs over to your permanent collection while getting rid of the rest easily.

Here’s the modified script released under a Creative Commons license.