Filed under: iTS, How-tos, iTunes, Terminal Tips
Quickly find your EMI music
Last week we asked if you will upgrade the EMI tracks you currently own to the new DRM-free versions when they become available in iTunes next month. Just over 2,500 of you said you would, so now the question becomes: How do I easily find my EMI music?MacOSXHints has the answer. Just launch Terminal and enter the following:
"mdfind -onlyin ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music
"kMDItemCopyright == '*Emi*' kMDItemCodecs == '*protected*' "
Note that this trick assumes your music lives in the default location. You can output the result to a handy text file by appending > ~/Desktop/myEMI.txt to the end of the command above. Cool!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Matt said 11:46AM on 4-10-2007
did y'all forget about desktop of the week? :)
Reply
Aron Trimble said 12:14PM on 4-10-2007
I've bought a hundred or so songs and I was surprised to find that this yielded only ONE hit. And it's not even a song I am crazy about!
Reply
Steve Shaner said 12:44PM on 4-10-2007
This technique is flawed, since some of my known EMI tracks have an kMDItemCodecs value with "(Protected)" and this also won't catch any of EMI's other labels showing up for kMDItemCopyright, like Reprise does for Depeche Mode. :\
This command's estimate is quite conservative.
Reply
Nathan Hart said 7:31PM on 4-10-2007
Hahaha, I have 1800+ tracks purchased from the iT(M)S and I had one hit. I don't even remember purchasing the song. It was probably something I bought because it came up in a conversation or something (sadly, when people talk about a song I just pop on and but it for $0.99). iTMS is addictive like that :/
Reply
Jorge Escala said 1:24PM on 4-10-2007
The command is missing some escaped characters. I posted the corrected command at macosxhints. Also note that EMI has a ton of sub-labels and you'll need to search for those too.
Reply
CHNEPR said 2:16PM on 4-10-2007
I'm more curious about finding EMI tracks in the iTS. You know, to show support.
Reply
Joe Clark said 3:20PM on 4-10-2007
If I wanted to type all that nonsense I'd use DOS. I thought we were using a graphical user interface, and I am pretty sure that the Macintosh magazines for the first ten years trumpeted the Macintosh interface as a rational alternative to what were invariably described as "arcane commands."
I don't do Terminal. Sorry.
Reply
Jorge said 5:46PM on 4-10-2007
Joe, you don't need to use the command line. The same thing can be accomplished via the Finder. Here's how:
1. Navigate to your "iTunes Music" folder in the Finder.
2. Select "Find" from the "File" menu.
3. Select "Other..." as a search parameter.
4. After the Finder has generated the list of possible search attributes, look for "Copyright," select it and click "OK."
5. Make sure "Contains" is selected.
6. Type "emi" in the field.
7. Remove any search parameters that may be present by default.
8. Repeat this process for all the labels that EMI owns. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EMI_labels.
However, for people who are comfortable with a command line, you can see how this can be much quicker and easier. Given an input file with the names of all the EMI labels, this can be accomplished with a single line entered into Terminal.
Reply
Jorge said 10:53PM on 4-10-2007
Here is a better version of that tip using a list of all the EMI sub-labels. This should result in far more matches:
http://jescala.com/content/view/14/1/
Reply
Chris S said 1:50AM on 4-11-2007
wow, out of my 2300+ iTunes songs more than 200 are EMI tracks. looking forward to the upgrades. horribly addictive thing iTunes but a great resource.
Reply