Comments on: Converting iTunes Playlists to M3U Playlists

By: rich

rich — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:38:37 +0000

nice code, i’ve done a lot of work in vb.net and c++ using the iTunes COM interface. one thing i think would make it faster would be is if you just get a handle to the playlist you want to export and for each item echo it(the fullpathname) to a text file. that way you dont have to first export to xml plus it cuts out the loading/parsing of the xml file

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:43:18 +0000

Wonderful! I’m glad it was helpful.

By: David Magniez

David Magniez — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 20:59:29 +0000

I’ve just created a repository for my XBMC addon based on your work.
It’s a real addon who make things easier, parse the library to export many playlist in the right directory in XBMC
(gui, compatible with dharma / current svn)

Thank you for your work, it made my work easier.

http://code.google.com/p/itunestom3u

By: Zach C

Zach C — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:11:36 +0000

@stephen: Thanks for the clarification.

+3 points for excellent use of the word “atavistic.” I had to look it up!

By: Stephen

Stephen — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:46:29 +0000

Zach: Looking at it, I think it’s an atavistic holdover from when I was including the optional title attributes of the M3U format. I was using % to have the string include the playlist name. As you discovered, that part should be thrown away.

By: Zach C

Zach C — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:49:28 +0000

I’m curious what line 34: outf.write(m3uHeader % pname) is attempting to do? This doesn’t appear to work. If i just write(m3uHeader) it works fine. I don’t think % is a valid operator on strings (unless part of a formatting code), and pname isn’t defined anywhere.

Thanks for the help. Useful program–glad I found it.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:44:30 +0000

The biggest benefit would be that you wouldn’t need to export all of your playlists from iTunes to get them to play on XBMC. It’s not a prefect solution, but it might be something worth playing around with. It’s currently the solution I’ve settled on.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:39:05 +0000

Josh:

Oh, huh. I’d played with SlimServer years ago, but this is the first I’ve heard of Firefly. What’s the benefit of using Firefly over just mounting the SMB share? Given that I’m having to use iTunes to put music on my iPhone, won’t I still need the SMB-shared music in my local iTunes library to make that happen?

abovenyquist:

I don’t use lambda functions often, but when I do I feel all studly.

By: abovenyquist

abovenyquist — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 01:04:16 +0000

My heart got all a twittery when I saw the lambda expressions too!

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:58:03 +0000

Have you tried using Firefly Media Server to serve up your iTunes library to XBMC? For serving up playlists it works great. It will parse the iTunes Library XML file and make the music library playable on any device that supports Apples DAAP protocol (i.e. XBMC). It will even parse smart playlists or playlists generated via the Genius feature.