Finally, after having sent mails to people high up at Apple, signing petitions, joining groups and blogging about it for many years, iTunes movie rental and purchase is coming to Scandinavia, possibly the world. That is great, we have been missing it for ages. Thank you, Apple, for allowing us to send you money Like many other people, I'm looking forward to trying out this service, especially the rental service.

But what this makes me really happy about is that I now am actually optimistic about iTunes Match being not only a US product. So far, we have had no access to iTunes movies, tv-shows, Apple's iBookstore and probably other similar features I forget. It even took for ages for the AppleTV to get to Denmark, I bought mine in Australia. But iTunes Match is exciting, and will hopefully be a really great showcase for iCloud. October 4th will be exciting in its own right, but the movies becoming available makes me excited that there will be less US-only services and more open-for-the-world services.

Not quite happy with any of the programs I found to identify iTunes duplicates, I spent an hour making my own (beats tracking down duplicates. ) I thought I'd share it with you. It's my first attempt at using OS X' ScriptingBridge and written in Python. I have no clue if it runs out of the box, I suppose you should have Developer Tools installed. It's not the fastest beast either, and Python and iTunes both use 50% CPU. But it gets the job done. If you wonder why I give so many parameters to the track class I should say that I plan on reusing it to do some more iTunes housekeeping. The script will mark all the duplicates with one star. Then I can round them up and delete them afterwards.

import struct
from ScriptingBridge import *

class Track:
   def __init__(self, name, album, artist, size, length, track, path):
     self.name= self.str(name)
     self.album= self.str(album)
     self.artist= self.str(artist)
     self.size = size
     self.length= self.str(length)
     self.track = track
     self.path= self.str(path)

   def str(self, s):
     try:
       return s.encode('utf-8')
     except:
       return "N/A"

   def equals(self, t):
     test = t.name == self.name
     test = test and t.album == self.album
     test = test and t.artist == self.artist
     test = test and t.size == self.size
     test = test and t.length == self.length
     test = test and t.track == self.track
     return test

   def __eq__(self, t):
     return self.equals(t)

iTunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes")
lib = iTunes.sources()[0].playlists()[0]
tracks = lib.tracks()
filetracks = lib.elementArrayWithCode_(struct.unpack('>L', 'cFlT')[0])

Tracks = []
Duplicates = []
duplicates = []
for track in filetracks:
  t = Track(track.name(), track.album(), track.artist(), track.size(), track.time(), track.trackNumber(),track.location())
  if(Tracks.__contains__(t)):
    Duplicates.append(t)
    duplicates.append(track)
  else:
    Tracks.append(t)

print len(duplicates)

# Deal with duplicates
for track in duplicates:
   track.setRating_(20)

A little note to Dan & David from their latest show on CRAP, iTunes' EULA and DRM technology is considered illegal in Norway according to the consumer rights watch. This is all over the news today. So publicity is coming on DRM technologies.

According to Kulturnytt on NRK Alltid nyheter, iTunes music store is coming to Norway April 28th. Does this mean it's coming to Sweden and Denmark at the same time?