iTunes 10 Kills Off Old Automator Workflows

By John Brownlee (4:13 am, Sep 03 2010)

Apple’s Automator is a fantastic way to manage your iTunes tracks… but with Apple’s iTunes 10 update, many iTunes-specific Automator workflows have simply stopped working.

According to upset users in Apple’s discussion forums, the vast majority of iTunes Automator actions go missing when you install iTunes 10. Try to run a previously created iTunes workflow and you will ironically be prompted to install iTunes 4.6 or higher. Ugh.

The good news here is that none of the functionality has disappeared from AppleScript, so it should be able to replicate the functionality if you change gears. Still, the sudden absence of iTunes functionality in Automator is mysterious: did Apple purposely drop the functionality, or is this a bug? If the former, what was Apple’s rationale?

7 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iTunes, News | Tagged: automator, bugs, iTunes, itunes 10, workflows |

MacGoo
You people at COM are on top of it. I had this problem with an automated sync applescript I had setup to sync my daily podcasts, and it gave me this very error. It HAS to be a bug – I can’t think of any reason why Apple would disable functionality like that – it defeats the whole purpose of Automator. Thanks for the coverage – nice to know I’m not alone.
http://tommypetersbicycles.blogspot.com Tommy Peters
The little Text to Audio workflow I got going for a student says that 10 is the ‘wrong version’. Has to be a bug. Just 2 complainants? Hope Apple takes notice.
http://twitter.com/houytre houytre
La soluce est ici : http://dlvr.it/4fltF suivez moi sur twitter @houytre pour plus d’infos. source : @MacOSXHintsRSS
Patrick
There’s some weird top-of-the-screen toolbar or something that pops up on your website. Please remove it.
Ron
None of my “Watch me do” workflows are working with the latest update. I hope this gets fixed I have a lot of scripts.
This error message shows up on all my workflows with “Watch me Do”:
The action “Watch Me Do” encountered an error.
Tom Wyllie
i have the same problem as Tommy Peters – I cant get the text to audio on my Microsoft Document to work with Automator, it says that it needs iTunes 4.6 or later – and yet Im on iTunes 10!! This has to be a bug, because all other problems I’ve been able to rectify, but sadly anything with Automator hits a dead end.
Here’s me wishing for a ‘cure’!!
Tom