itunes_tools

Introduction

These tools, written to be used with iTunes on Mac OS X, serve three purposes:

• using iTunes as a GUI to select music files (itunes_selection);
• creating new playlists in iTunes (make_itunes_playlist and build_itunes_playlists);
• adding files to the iTunes library while avoiding the creation of duplicate entries (itunes_add_missing).

Requirements

Once compiled, the binaries should work on OS X 10.4 and later, when using a 32-bit Intel processor. However, I have only tested them on a 64-bit 10.7 system. The source compiles with Xcode 4.3, but it may also work with earlier versions.

Installation

Running the install.sh script will compile the source using Xcode, and install the binaries in /usr/local/bin, and the man pages (where existent) in /usr/local/share/man.

Usage

itunes_selection

Select tracks in the main window of iTunes and run

itunes_selection

to get a newline-separated list of the paths to the selected tracks, similar to the output of find.

make_itunes_playlist

Running

make_itunes_playlist "My Playlist" file1 file2 file3

will create a new playlist in iTunes, titled "My Playlist (timestamp)", containing file1, file2 and file3 as its tracks. Alternatively, you can use - as an argument to read a list of paths from stdin:

find foo/ -iname "*.mp3" | make_itunes_playlist "My Playlist" -

build_itunes_playlists

Suppose you have a folder foo/, containing an m3u playlist list.m3u, and a subfolder foo/bar/ containing another playlist another\ list.m3u. Then running

build_itunes_playlists foo

will created a new folder playlist titled "Imported (timestamp)" in iTunes, containg a playlist "list" containing the tracks in list.m3u, and a subfolder "bar" containing "another list".

itunes_add_missing

Suppose you have a folder foo/ containing lots of MP3 files, some of which are already in the iTunes library, but some of which are not. Use the following command to add only those files which are missing from the iTunes library to it:

find foo/ -iname "*.mp3" | itunes_add_missing

Note that itunes_add_missing is a little slow to start because it collects the inodes of all file tracks in your iTunes library when you run it. It does not check for doubles in its input.

Silly example

Select some file tracks in iTunes and run

itunes_selection | make_itunes_playlist "Don't need no plus button" -

to make a playlist out of them without using the "+" button in the lower left of the screen.