playlistrs

Extracts playlist data from iTunes®/Music Libraries. Tested against iTunes

Note About Catalina and later:

Starting in MacOS Catalina, iTunes® has been replaced with the new Music app. While the new Music app includes the ability to export to m3u or m3u8, but if like me you have 50+ playlists it's a little inconvenient. You can automate the exporting with Automator but I prefer to just use this tool which can also change the path for other devices.

Installation

I recommend installing via cargo. First make sure you have Rust installed then just run

cargo install --lock playlistrs

at the terminal prompt. There is also a precompiled binary for Apple Silicon machines in the releases section of the github repo. You can download, unzip, and put it somewhere on your $PATH.

Usage

FIrst you'll need to dump your iTunes/Apple Music library because as far as I can tell Apple does not expose an API for tool to grab it directly from your local music data. You'll want to open iTunes/Music, then use the context menu to go

File -> Library -> Export Library

It doesn't really matter where you save it, but you'll need to remember and it should be someplace that you can easily find it from the command line in Terminal. Here I'm saving it to the desktop:

You can then fire up Terminal or whatever terminal emulator you use and pass the path to the Library.xml that you dumped a second ago:

For all of the available options see --help or browse the source code.