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Automatically generate Apple Store Catalog IDs and apply them to files
bstrPostMarch 15, 2024, 13:40
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March 15, 2024, 14:13
Normal topicAutomatically generate Apple Store Catalog IDs and apply them to files

Hi,

I would like to be able to tag television episodes so that they are correctly distinguished by TV.app as being SD or HD, but both files are shown once in the Library. This requires each episode have a globally unique Apple Store Catalog ID entry that's nine digits long.

It's quite cumbersome to generate these separately and apply them to each episode. Is there a way to have Yate prompt for, say, the beginning of the cnID, have the last four or five automatically generated and applied to the files in sequence?

Any advice on how to go about scripting this would be much appreciated.
2MR2PostMarch 15, 2024, 14:20
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August 23, 2012, 19:27
Normal topicAutomatically generate Apple Store Catalog IDs and apply them to files

It depends what you mean by automatically generated. If it is just a matter of incrementally numbering them from 0 or 1, it is easy. However if the catalog numbers are fully different for each episode, I don't know how it could be done. Also would you want the numbers to be applied in the order in the file list or somehow based on Season and Episode?
bstrPostMarch 15, 2024, 14:46
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Normal topicAutomatically generate Apple Store Catalog IDs and apply them to files

As far as I can tell, every cnID is unique to a given episode, and those cnIDs aren't incremented, they appear to be random, so episode 1 could be 123456789 and episode 2 could be 987654321.
There's nothing preventing them from just being incremented, so one could say that all episodes of a season begin with the same six digits and just pad and incrementally fill the remainder in ascending order by episode number or whatever.
The key is that Episode 1 SD and Episode 1 HD have the same cnID, Episode 2 SD and Episode 2 HD have a different cnID etc.

Of course the ideal would be a way to search the TV store to query the actual IDs.
There is the potential to have conflicts in the TV.app database due to inadvertently reusing a cnID.

2MR2PostMarch 15, 2024, 15:37
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Normal topicAutomatically generate Apple Store Catalog IDs and apply them to files

Hmm.. the Apple Music API cannot search for TV shows. There's also an iTunes Search API which can search for TV shows but it does not return catalog numbers.

As I said, I can generate any sequence for cnID but I'm still not sure how you would want the workflow to work.

It seems to me that you have multiple copies of an episode some as HD and some as SD. If you just want an index generated as a suffix to the supplied catalog number prefix based on the Show Name, Episode, Season and Video Definition fields, that can be done ... ensuring that HD and SD get the same numbers. Show Name is only necessary if you want to be able to do more than one show at a time. It will all fall apart if Episode, Season or Video Definition is not populated.

Theoretically it could work as follows:

- load up a bunch of episodes and select them
- for each unique Show Name, you would be prompted for a cnID prefix. 5 digits would work as Yate easily pads to 4.
- Yate would flush out the prefix for every track with the same show name based on Episode and Season to define uniqueness. If there's more than one rendition of an Epidoe and Season, ie. HD and SD, they would get the same number.

If this is correct and makes sense, let me know and I'll knock off the action.
bstrPostMarch 15, 2024, 16:12
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Normal topicAutomatically generate Apple Store Catalog IDs and apply them to files

That sounds like very good solution, a lot more elaborate than I had envisaged.
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