If you create a lot of playlists in iTunes, you sometimes want to find if a certain song is in a playlist, and which one. You can do this in iTunes, using a contextual menu. Right-click on a track – or video – and choose Show in Playlist. But to access this menu item, you have to scroll down near the bottom of a long menu. And if you want to find out where another track is, you have to start over: right-click, scroll, select.
There’s got to be a better way to do this, right? Well, Doug Adams has created a great AppleScript applet called Show in Playlists. This $2 applet shows you where the currently selected track is; which media libraries, and which playlists.
As you scroll through tracks, or select different tracks, Show in Playlists shows you where the tracks are. If you select multiple tracks, Show in Playlists shows you any playlists that contain all the selected tracks.
Show in Playlists also shows the current playlist, in blue; iTunes doesn’t show that. As you can see in the screenshots above, iTunes shows the folder the current playlist is in (Artists), but not the name of the playlist.
If you click on a playlist in Show in Playlists, you can go directly to that playlist. And if you want to stop Show in Playlists, you can click the Freeze button; it will show the playlists for the last selected track, and you can move around in your iTunes library, with the last playlists still visible.
This is a great tool for creating and editing playlists. Instead of using the contextual menu, which involves a lot of clicking and scrolling, Show in Playlists just requires that you click to select tracks.
If you use a lot of playlists in iTunes, you’ll want to get Show in Playlists.