Applescript, iTunes, and 'date' - perl

Question

I've got an applescript that I call for a song to set the play count and another to set the last played date. These are called from a perl script fetching data from last.fm. Unfortunately, whenever I call the last played date script, I get an error message setItunesLastPlayed.scpt: execution error: iTunes got an error: A descriptor type mismatch occurred. (-10001).
I'm calling it like this:
osascript /Users/gms8994/setItunesLastPlayed.scpt "<ARTIST>" "<TITLE>" "Wednesday, July 05, 2011 07:14:11 AM"
I did notice that if I request the value of the last play from itunes, it comes back without zero-padding days and hours, so I tried removing those, to no avail.
Here's my script.
on run argv
tell application "iTunes"
set theArtist to (item 1 of argv)
set theTitle to (item 2 of argv)
set theLastPlay to (item 3 of argv)
set theLastPlay to date theLastPlay
set results to (every file track of playlist "Library" whose artist contains theArtist and name contains theTitle)
repeat with t in results
tell t
say theLastPlay
set played date of t to theLastPlay
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end run
Can anyone point me to the fix?

Answer 1

The played date property of a track requires a date object, not just the date string. You will need to convert your date into a date object:
set newDate to (current date)
set month of newDate to "July"
set year of newDate to "2011"
(* You can fill in the rest *)
set played date of t to newDate
I don't think there is a way to directly create a date object from a given string, so you'll have to maintain a function to do that for you in case last.fm (or the technology they rely to store and report back dates) decides to change their date format.