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April 6, 2007

tips

Find which of your iTunes tracks are from EMI

Posted Apr. 6, ’07, 5:35 PM PT by Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen
Category | Tips

finditunesemi.jpg

I know you’re just eagerly waiting to update your purchased songs from EMI. Instead of checking out the impressive list of artists signed with the label (including gems like Britney Spears, Hilary Duff, and Paris Hilton — and others, don’t worry) to get an idea of what you’ll be able to upgrade, our friends at MacOSXHints.com have concocted a clever Terminal command that finds all the EMI songs you bought from the iTunes Store.

To find these tracks and output the list to a text file on your desktop, open the Terminal application (located in Applications/Utilities) and type the following:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music
“kMDItemCopyright == ‘*Emi*’ kMDItemCodecs == ‘*protected*’ ” > ~/Desktop/myEMI.txt

I tried this and got a grand total of 4 songs (granted, I haven’t bought much on iTunes), but if you’re a heavy iTS purchaser, this could be an interesting method to find out in advance which tracks will be upgradable to high-quality, DRM-free versions in May.


5 Comments

Eduardo said:

Wow, I got a lot of songs. Granted most came from my CD collection; is there anyway to find out how many songs total one could theoretically update?

April 6, 2007 9:00 PM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

Eduardo, if you used the Terminal command above, it should've found only purchased tracks, nothing from CDs. Are you sure they come from CDs? Besides, I don't think ripped tracks have copyright info.

April 6, 2007 9:29 PM
Kelmon said:

Hmm, just a ColdPlay album and a Gorillaz single. Shame but it seems that most of my purchased music came from "the others".

Incidentally, the following list of artists signed to EMI may be useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artists_signed_to_EMI

April 7, 2007 2:29 AM
Thomas said:

I have my library on an external drive and am a Unix idiot. The drive, at least in Mac parlance, is named "Sound & Vision"

If anyone could edit the terminal command to work with this drive, or will all mounted volumes, I would be really grateful.

April 8, 2007 6:01 AM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

Thomas, you can adjust this command to scan a library that's in a different directory by replacing ~/Music/iTunes Music with the path of your library. For instance: /Volumes/Sound & Vision/iTunes Music or something similar.

April 8, 2007 3:00 PM

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