Mac Automation: E-mail songs from iTunes

What do you do if you need to email a song from iTunes to your work computer, or to another machine you own? If you have one machine where you do all your CD imports, you might want to send a track to the office; maybe you've got your GarageBand compositions in iTunes and you want to send one to a friend. We can simply this process by using Automator for Leopard. In this how-to, I am going to show you how to quickly and easily e-mail songs from your iTunes library.

Continue reading to learn how to e-mail songs using Automator.

Creating the workflow
Let's first create the Automator workflow. To create this workflow, just place the following Automator actions together (in the same order):

Get Selected iTunes Items
New Mail Message

Saving the workflow
Let's save this workflow as a plug-in to the Script Menu. Click File > Save As Plug-in; select "Script menu" from the "Plug-in for:" drop-down menu. Type in a save name and click "Save." If you don't already have the script menu in your menu bar, then let's add it. The script menu gives you quick access to all of your saved AppleScripts and Automator workflows.

To enable the Script menu, just open AppleScript Utility.app (found in /Applications/AppleScript/) and click "Show Script menu in the menu bar." You should then see a small AppleScript looking scroll appear in your menu bar. This gives you one-click access to saved scripts and Automator actions no matter what application you might be in.

Running the workflow
To run the workflow, you need to select one or more songs in iTunes (you can highlight multiple songs by command + clicking on the song). When you have some songs select, run the workflow by clicking on the Script menu and clicking on your saved script -- in this instance "E-mail iTunes Song." Automator will then grab the song and attach it to a new e-mail.

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What do you do if you need to email a song from iTunes to your work computer, or to another machine you own? If you have one machine where...

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Lem

Quicksilver can do this really easily already. Invoke QS, start typing "current selection", tab over and type "email" (choose compose to bring up a new message box or send to send immediately), and tab over and start typing the person's email address. You can set this entire process a trigger and give it a keyboard shortcut.

If you don't need a trigger for this entire process, at least set one for Current Selection. I have it set where optn+cmd+space will bring up QS with the current selection already in the first box.

May 27 2008 at 11:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Panzarino

A quick addition, you can also put the automator action in the iTunes Scripts folder. This allows you to run the script from the iTunes scripts menu. However you need to make a few changes...

1. Save your automator workflow as an application, rather than a plugin. Also name it Email Song

2. Copy this script into the AppleScript editor, and save it as a normal script (not an application). Also name it Email Song

set thePath to path to me as string
tell application "Finder" to set theContainer to the container of the item thePath as string
set theContainer to theContainer & "Email Song.app"
tell application "Finder" to open theContainer

3. Place both the automator workflow app, and the applescript script in ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts

May 27 2008 at 10:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply