Count number of iTunes songs by Artist with a name starting with a letter

Question

I am brand new to Applescript. I would like a script that would list the artist and the number of songs in that artist's folder. I would like to do it just for artists whose names starts with A. When I am ready, I would then get the list for artist whose names starts with B, and so on. I did find this post: "What's the fastest way in iOS to retrieve the number of songs for a specific artist?" Maybe that script would work but I don't know how to modify this line "if (artistName != nil)" to get what I want. Also, I don't know where the information is stored so I can retreive it "// store the new count [artists setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:numSongs] forKey:artistName]; Oh, and I am not using iOS I will be using osx. Perhaps I could modify this script that I found. It gets the number of albums by artist.

MPMediaQuery *albumQuery = [MPMediaQuery albumsQuery];
NSArray *albumCollection = [albumQuery collections];
NSCountedSet *artistAlbumCounter = [NSCountedSet set];
[albumCollection enumerateObjectsUsingBlock:^(MPMediaItemCollection  *album, NSUInteger idx, BOOL *stop) {
NSString *artistName = [[album representativeItem] valueForProperty:MPMediaItemPropertyArtist];
[artistAlbumCounter addObject:artistName];
}];
NSLog(@"Artist Album Counted Set: %@", artistAlbumCounter);

I appreciate any help that you can offer. Thanks!

Answer 1

It makes no sense to look at iOS code and ObjectiveC at that in order to figure out what you should do with Applescript! In any case, here is what you want.

tell application "iTunes"
    # Get playlist currently selected 
    set myPlayList to view of window 1

    set s to (every track in myPlayList whose artist begins with "g")
    repeat with t in s
        log name of t
    end repeat
    log (count of s)
end tell