I got really pissed at iTunes today: it crashed and then wouldn't start back up, throwing the infamous 'locked file' error. In exasperation, I tried Songbird. It looks promising, but still needs lots of work and didn't play my music-over-Samba very well. I then got the latest Cog release.
In my experience, Cog is simple, straight-forward, performs no voodoo and just works (Troll: "Stay away from the voodoo!"). I really like the fact that I can browse the file system in Cog, and drag the albums into the list pane, but I didn't want to start years worth of playlists all over again...
At which point I remembered that a couple of years ago I blogged about parsing iTunes playlists with ElemetTree. It looks like the effbot archives no longer point to the link I updated that post with, but google cache served me well and I found Fredrik Lundh's code, repasted here:
try:Which was a great start, but I needed .m3u output. After reading how simple the format was, I was off and running. The end result was all of my iTunes playlists playable by Cog, which I am using now -- as I type -- to enjoy my music, free of pain. One thing worth exploring would be how to preserve the ordering of iTunes' playlist items.
from cElementTree import iterparse
except ImportError:
from elementtree.ElementTree import iterparse
import base64, datetime, re
unmarshallers = {
# collections
"array": lambda x: [v.text for v in x],
"dict": lambda x:
dict((x[i].text, x[i+1].text) for i in range(0, len(x), 2)),
"key": lambda x: x.text or "",
# simple types
"string": lambda x: x.text or "",
"data": lambda x: base64.decodestring(x.text or ""),
"date": lambda x:
datetime.datetime(*map(int, re.findall("\d+", x.text))),
"true": lambda x: True,
"false": lambda x: False,
"real": lambda x: float(x.text),
"integer": lambda x: int(x.text),
}
def load(file):
parser = iterparse(file)
for action, elem in parser:
unmarshal = unmarshallers.get(elem.tag)
if unmarshal:
data = unmarshal(elem)
elem.clear()
elem.text = data
elif elem.tag != "plist":
raise IOError("unknown plist type: %r" % elem.tag)
return data
Here's the code I used to "export" the iTunes playlists as .m3u:
import reWith usage like the following:
m3uList = "#EXTM3U\n%s\n"
m3uEntry = "#EXTINF:%(length)s,"
m3uEntry += "%(artist)s - %(album)s - %(song)s\n%(filename)s\n"
def phraseUnicode2ASCII(message):
"""
Works around the built-in function str(message) which aborts when non-ASCII
unicode characters are given to it.
Modified from http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-June/150077.html
"""
try:
newMsg = message.encode('ascii')
except (UnicodeDecodeError, UnicodeEncodeError):
chars=[]
for uc in message:
try:
char = uc.encode('ascii')
chars.append(char)
except (UnicodeDecodeError, UnicodeEncodeError):
pass
newMsg = ''.join(chars)
return newMsg.strip()
class Playlists(object):
def __init__(self, filename=None, destDir=None):
self.lib = None
if filename:
self.lib = load(filename)
if not destDir:
destDir = './'
self.destDir = destDir
def processTrack(self, trackData):
length = trackData.get('Total Time') or 300000
song = trackData.get('Name') or 'Unknown'
artist = trackData.get('Artist') or 'Unknown'
album = trackData.get('Album') or 'Unknown'
data = {
'filename': trackData['Location'],
'length': int(length) / 1000 + 1,
'song': phraseUnicode2ASCII(song),
'artist': phraseUnicode2ASCII(artist),
'album': phraseUnicode2ASCII(album),
}
return m3uEntry % data
def processTrackIDs(self, ids):
output = ''
for id in ids:
try:
trackData = self.lib['Tracks'][str(id)]
output += self.processTrack(trackData)
except KeyError:
print "Could not find track %i; skipping ..." % id
return output
def cleanName(self, unclean):
clean = re.sub('[^\w]', '_', unclean)
clean = re.sub('_{1,}', '_', clean)
return clean
def exportPlaylists(self):
for playlist in self.lib['Playlists']:
playlistName = self.cleanName(playlist['Name'])
try:
items = playlist['Playlist Items']
except KeyError:
print "Playlist seems to be empty; skipping ..."
continue
trackIDs = [x['Track ID'] for x in items]
data = m3uList % self.processTrackIDs(trackIDs)
fh = open("%s/%s.m3u" % (self.destDir, playlistName), 'w+')
fh.write(data)
fh.close()
def exportPlaylists(filename, dest=None):
pls = Playlists(filename, dest)
pls.exportPlaylists()
>>> from iTunesExport import exportPlaylists
>>> BASE = "/Volumes/itunes/__Playlists__"
>>> exportPlaylists('%s/Library.xml' % BASE, BASE)
Update: I've tweaked the code in this post a little bit, due to a reader's questions. To run this, copy both code blocks into a single file you should be good to go.
