Lots of cars now have USB interfaces to allow you to bring music with you. Those are great because you can buy a USB stick for much lower $/GB ($15 for 64gb = $0.23/gb) than by getting the storage space as part of an iPod nano ($149 for 16gb = $9.31/gb) or iPod touch ($299 for 64gb = $4.67/gb).
But I ran into a problem getting music copied over from my iTunes library onto the USB stick in a way that I could use it.
The first problem was that with a lot of music, I find it helpful to organize it by Genre and then by Album. That lets me quickly navigate to the album / songs I'm looking for. iTunes lets you drag (copy) music over to a USB stick, but then you just get all the files dropped into a single folder with no organization.
The second problem I ran into was that what ends up in that folder is a copy of the file where the name is whatever the underlying filename was originally created as, but that often includes all kinds of other information (junk) depending on what software was used to rip the song. Any cleanup you've done in iTunes to improve the name (or fix other meta data) is ignored. You just get the original file name.
To use the playlist_exporter (this script), you:
I tend to run ruby under RVM (https://rvm.io/) which no longer installs bundler by default. If you don't have bundler installed, you will need to install it first
$ gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc
NOTE: you may need sudo to sudo the preceding command, depending on your installation directory and permissions
once you've got bundler installed, then
bundle install
ruby playlist_exporter.rb process
the playlist_exporter will prompt you for where it should find:
- the XML file you exported your playlist to, and
- where it should write the music files to (this should be the path to your USB drive, or to a temp directory you will manually copy over)
and it will copy all the songs from the playlist onto the USB stick organized in a hierarchy of Genre and Album using the iTunes meta data. It will generate new file names that are
<track number>-<song name from iTunes>
#==> 9-Rock of Ages.mp3
so you end up with a final result like:
As far as I can tell, .mp3 ("MPEG Audio File") and .m4a ("Purchased AAC audio file") export and play without problems.
If your library contains protected (DRM) music, you can export it, but it won't play. In my experience, songs downloaded from Apple that have the "Kind" of "Protected AAC audio file" or "Apple Music AAC audio file" will not work. These seem to show up as .m4p.
if you ask for help from playlist_exporter, it will show you the options it accepts:
ruby playlist_exporter.rb help process
Usage:
playlist_exporter.rb process
Options:
-v, [--verbose] # running in verbose mode will also show each file as it's copied
-d, [--debug] # in debug mode files will not actually be copied
-f, [--force] # normally, copying a file is skipped if a file with the same name and size already exists in the destination. Force mode always copies.
process playlist