Month: June 2009

Don’t even get me started on “Document Compatibility” in Internet Explorer 8. In my opinion, flagging content as kosher for a specific version, of a specific browser, on a specific operating system, flies in the face of everything Web developers have been pushing for in the last decade plus. But I digress.

What’s the definition of irony? When you’re in an editor and click on the “learn more about document compatibility” link, which opens in your default browser (Opera 9.6x) and this is what you see. Yes ladies and gentlemen, the following screen shot is of a document labeled (and all about) “Defining Document Compatibility“:

Seriously … Microsoft … is this some kind of giant Andy Kaufman-esque joke that I don’t get?

I’m working on digitizing my 700+ CD collection (oy vey!). I may go into greater detail about that whole process in another post, but here’s a quick tip for now. If you want to isolate the songs in your iTunes library based on their file type (like MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, etc.), you can do so with a Smart Playlist. But there’s a bit of a trick here, you need to know the magic string to type into the “Kind” field of the playlist. The folks over at Mac OS X Hints have done the work for us. Here’s a pretty table:

File Type	“Kind” string
AAC	AAC audio file
AIFF	AIFF audio file
Apple Lossess	Apple Lossless audio file
Audible.com	Audible file
MP3	MPEG audio file
Radio Stream	MPEG audio stream
WAV	WAV audio file

Another way to get the magic string is to simply view the Get Info window of the file in question. But as Doug Adams of Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes pointed out, you can’t copy and paste that. So he whipped up this bit of code. Paste this code into the Script Editor and run it while the track in question is playing in iTunes:
tell application "iTunes"
display dialog "Current track's kind is:" default answer ((get kind of current track) as string)
end tell

If you have other file types not listed here, please comment with their magic string so I may compile them here. Thanks!