This site is a growing collection of scripts designed to extend and automate the powerful macOS music player Swinsian. These scripts are designed to help manage, organise, and clean music libraries quickly and consistently, especially when working with large collections.
If you enjoy maintaining your own music library rather than relying entirely on automated tools, these scripts can help reduce the repetitive work while still keeping you in control of how your music is organised.
What is Swinsian?
Swinsian is a sophisticated music player for macOS designed for users who maintain their own music libraries. It supports a wide range of audio formats and offers powerful tools such as:
- Folder watching for automatic library updates
- Advanced metadata editing
- Smart playlists
- Highly responsive performance even with very large collections
Unlike many modern streaming-focused applications, Swinsian is built for people who manage their own music filesand want full control over their library.
One of its most powerful features is its support for scripting, which allows external automation tools to interact directly with the application.
What is AppleScript?
AppleScript is a built-in scripting language for macOS that allows applications to communicate with each other and automate tasks.
Many macOS applications support AppleScript, which means scripts can:
- Control applications
- Modify files and metadata
- Create playlists
- Perform batch operations
- Coordinate actions across multiple apps
For music libraries, this can be incredibly useful. Scripts can process hundreds or thousands of tracks in seconds, performing tasks that would otherwise be tedious and repetitive if done manually.
Why manually organise your music?
There are several excellent tools that automatically manage music metadata, including Beets and Yate.
These tools can be extremely powerful, but music collections are often very personal. Everyone has their own preferences for how artists, genres, albums, and metadata should be organised.
For some collectors, automation alone is not enough. Instead, scripts can be used to assist with organisation while still allowing the user to make the final decisions.
This approach keeps your library consistent, intentional, and tailored to your own listening habits.
A little history
When iTunes dominated music management on macOS, one of the most valuable resources for music collectors was the work of Doug Adams.
Doug created a huge collection of scripts that allowed users to automate tasks inside iTunes. For many users, those scripts became essential tools for managing large music libraries.
Swinsian continues that tradition by supporting AppleScript, allowing similar automation workflows to be recreated and expanded.
Many of the ideas behind the scripts on this site were inspired by Doug’s work, though others have been developed specifically for the way I prefer to organise my own collection.
What are Swinsian scripts?
Swinsian scripts are AppleScripts that interact directly with the Swinsian application to perform specific tasks.
These scripts can:
- Clean and standardise metadata
- Batch edit tags
- Create or modify playlists
- Rename tracks
- Fix common tagging problems
- Perform large search-and-replace operations across your library
Some scripts are simple utilities designed to save time, while others perform more complex library-wide changes.
Over time this collection will grow as new ideas and workflows are developed.
Contributing or requesting scripts
If you have an idea for a script or a workflow you would like to automate, feel free to get in touch.
Many of the scripts on this site were created to solve small problems that appear when managing large music collections. If a script can be made flexible enough to help others, I am always happy to add it to the collection.
Disclaimer
Although the scripts on this site have been thoroughly tested, no script is perfect.
Some scripts perform advanced search-and-replace operations or modify metadata fields across large numbers of tracks. Because of this, unexpected results can occasionally occur depending on the structure of your library.
Before running any script, it is strongly recommended that you backup your Swinsian database and your music files.
These scripts are provided as tools to assist with library management, but I cannot take responsibility for unintended changes.
Many scripts will continue to evolve as improvements and fixes are discovered.
Buy me a coffee?
Like Doug’s original scripts, everything here is provided free of charge.
If you find the scripts useful and would like to support the project, donations are always appreciated.
I hope to continue expanding the site with additional scripts, improvements, and possibly some of the hardware and home-automation projects I have been experimenting with.
Your support helps make that possible.
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