When podcasts arrived on the iTMS, I subscribed to a couple that published songs as is, without speech or anything. With iTunes 4.9, I only had to “Convert to MP3” in order to get the songs into the regular library. Since iTunes 5 (I suppose — maybe 6) it’s not working anymore: whatever you do, it remembers it was a podcast, and only displays it in the library’s “Podcasts” category — and in none of my automatic playlists.

Here’s the solution found on macosxhints: load fixid3tag.c, launch Terminal, type gcc fixid3tag.c -o fixid3tag, then for each mp3 (which you can get by drag-and-dropping from iTunes to the Finder) ./fixid3tag chemin/fichier.mp3 and, voilà, regular mp3s to be added back to the library.

You’re free to contribute a way to get fixid3tag to accept drag-and-drops, or an AppleScript wrapper to do the same.

P.S. Oh, wait, it’s pretty simple, so I can do it myself. Open Script Editor, type:

on open target files
  repeat with onefile in target files
    do shell script "/chemin complet/fixid3tag " & quoted form of POSIX path of onefile
  end repeat
end open

Save as an “Application bundle” (don’t know what it means exactly, but that’s what I read) and you get an application that’ll accept dropped MP3 files.