Minor Bug Stops Automator from Working in iTunes 10, But There’s a Fix
Difficulty: Intermediate A few fans have expressed anger over Apple’s removal of Automator workflows.
Difficulty: Intermediate
A few fans have expressed anger over Apple’s removal of Automator workflows. Turns out, it was a mistake.
See, when a someone tries to use an Automator action, they are prompted to use iTunes 4.6 or higher. According to user chrischarm in the Macworld forums, this is because the system reads 10 as lower than 4.6 (because it is simply looking at the first number, in this case a one).
It turns out that fixing it isn’t very hard, but you must be very careful with the files you choose to modify. Please, if you have any doubts about whether or not you can carry out an action like this, it may be best to wait for an Apple update. They will no doubt fix this in the very near future.
In this example, the user says they like to use the Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track action, but it stopped working with the iTunes update.
1) The .workflow for this action is in /System/Library/Services. The workflow file in this case is called Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track.workflow.
2) Double-clicking on the .workflow file will show the user the error, in this case Import Audio Files and Add Songs to Playlist could not be loaded because “the application iTunes is the wrong version.”
3) Now you must go to /System/Library/Automator. Here, chrischram warns that you must not modify files under system. You must copy Import Audio File.action and Add Songs to Playlist.action to a “convenient location in your User area.”
4) After copying the files, you must right-click one of the files and select Show Package Contents. Within that package, you should find a folder called Contents. Inside that folder, you will find a file called Info.plist.
5) Open that .plist file with a text editor (anything such as Text Edit will do) and you will have to find a section that looks like the following:
<array> <dict> <key>Display Name</key> <string>iTunes</string> <key>Resource</key> <string>com.apple.iTunes</string> <key>Type</key> <string>application</string> <key>Version</key> <string>4.6</string> </dict></array>
6) The next step is to delete the version line and the 4.6 line and save the file. Now you must do the same for the other .action file
7) Start up Automator, and select File>Import Actions. Choose the actions you just saved. These will be placed in their proper location in ~/Library/Automator. It’s also suggested that you color label these so that they can easily be removed when Apple fixes the problem. You may also need to log out then log back in to get the workflow to work. It should work similarly for any Automator action that stopped working upon the iTunes 10 release.
Full credit to user Chrischram at Macworld forums who created this fix
Continued here:
Minor Bug Stops Automator from Working in iTunes 10, But There’s a Fix
