Extract mp3 path from a iTunes playlist

Question

I want to write a program in Python which would allow me to populate a folder with mp3 files extracted from an iTunes playlist.

Here's why: my car has a stereo which can read USB drives, so I want to populate my USB drive with my favourite songs which are already organized in iTunes.

Is that possibile? I've checked iTunes APIs but could not find anything useful...

Thanks

Matteo - Italy

Answer 1

I don't have a ready-made solution, but I could help you on your way towards making a solution yourself.

The playlist parsing would be the most difficult part. Populating your USB drive should be simple with the shutil and os modules and other tools, so I won't address that part.

You could do a search for "itunes" in PyPI, a.k.a. the Cheese Shop. The "hachoir-parser" package looks promising. You could also investigate the format of the iTunes library files and cobble a solution to retrieve the information that you want. It doesn't use the API, but for your purposes, it might be adequate.

Hope this is helpful, at least a little bit.

Answer 2

I stumbled on this post after having written my own. So at the cost of making a shameless plug, here it is: https://github.com/lorenzog/python_playground/tree/master/itunes-extracter

The key bit you might be interested in is the following piece of code (once you've exported the playlist as an XML file):

r = etree.parse(xmlfile)
locations = r.xpath('//key[.="Location"]')
for el in locations:
    srcpath_enc_fullurl = el.getnext().text

Notice the getnext() call: that's because each <key>Location</key> item is followed by the full path of each audio file in URL-encoded format. Something like file:///Users/myself/foo/bar/music%20 directory/

I hope this helps if not you at least somebody else.

Answer 3

Ciao Matteo,

You probably have a solution by now, but how about plain old drag and drop ?

1) Create playlist of all songs to copy
2) Select all drag and drop onto USB
3) Rename/retag as needed

I wrote a couple of extensions to iTunes, so if the above does not help, let me know.

Simone