Automated Adding to iTunes

February 27, 2011 4:31 PM

OSX automation. Broadly speaking: I have a folder where all my music torrents go. How can I get these automatically added to iTunes.

Is this possible?

Ideally:
- Torrent completes download in user specified folder ('Torrent Downloads') which creates a new folder ('Album') with files inside
- Only mp3 files are added to iTunes with other filetypes (.m3u, .jpg, etc.) being ignored
- Files are added to a user specified playlist
- The above is automated, running in the background

The above is an ideal, but really I'd like to eliminate the time it takes to go down the list of my downloaded torrents, locate the folder, pluck the mp3s, drag them to my 'recently downloaded [week number]' playlist.

posted by karmaportrait to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Open up Automator, make a Folder Action pointing at your download folder. You'll want to find the 'Import files into iTunes' action (under Music), and point it at your playlist. Save it, and it should trigger whenever there are new files. You can add in further actions to automatically make your datestamped folders as well.
posted by ConstantineXVI at 4:47 PM on February 27, 2011

Did you google this at all? It's built in to iTunes.

add to iTunes folder
posted by buckaroo_benzai at 4:59 PM on February 27, 2011

Response by poster: @buckaroo_benzai

that is completely new to me (despite being from 2009). i don't think this would be a good solution however since m3u files, which accompany some torrents are playlist files so when imported into iTunes it causes the music files to be imported again.
posted by karmaportrait at 5:07 PM on February 27, 2011

huh. i had no idea itunes could do this on its own now.

i use hazel to pretty much do the same thing. when i drop something into a watched folder, hazel grabs it, dumps it into itunes, adds it to a playlist of new material, and organizes everything it's dumped in into folders (so i can make sure everything's tagged correctly). you can make hazel look for certain filetypes versus itunes pulling in just whatever (like m3u's).
posted by patricking at 5:26 PM on February 27, 2011

I just add the Add To iTunes folder into my sidebar (just drag and drop it onto there) and then I throw anything in there manually. It's a bit more work than having an automated solution, but it means I've got control & I don't have another program running & I'm too lazy to actually set something up.
posted by Magnakai at 5:31 PM on February 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

the automatic add to itunes feature might result in a lot of stuff with bad id3 tags being automatically added, depending on the quality standards of the places you're downloading the torrents from... it may be necessary to go through once a week in your 'recently added' items section and manually re-tag a lot of stuff.
posted by thewalrus at 7:24 PM on February 27, 2011

I came in to recommend Hazel, which is what I use, but I see I've been
beaten to it. It's not free, but it's very useful and often comes up in software bundles.
posted by badmoonrising at 10:43 AM on February 28, 2011