🚀 go-pugleaf

Martin beat me to it. 

Further to Ole's comment, I wrote a Real Basic application yesterday (not an InDesign related one) that provides a front end to iTunes. 

I've long been frustrated by the absence of decent support for classical music in iTunes (has to do with the absence of the concept of a multi-movement work). 

Anyway, I have my "Classical" playlist organized so that the Albums are actually works. Each "album" is named thus: 

Composer: Name of work 

The only restriction that I've imposed on myself is that the name of a work can't have a colon in it. 

My application lists the composers in a list box. When you double-click a composer name, the list of works appears in another list box. Double-clicking a work in that list box causes that work (and only that work) to be played by iTunes. 

Now you have the picture, there's quite a lot of text munging to be done here. My first version used AppleScript to make the lists of data I needed for the listboxes. It proved to be very slow and buggy -- my 9.1 system kept freezing. 

My second version just passed the complete list of tracks to my RB program (using "�" to separate the tracks -- so a work name can't have that character, either) and I did the text munging there. 

At the moment, I have 1284 tracks in my Classical playlist and I was astonished at just how quickly the RealBasic loop worked even when extracting the works of composers whose names are a long way down the list. 

So, henceforth, I shall be writing primitive AppleScripts to get/set data in InDesign and doing any hard work in REALbasic. 

Dave