Exporting iTunes playlists

Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Windows, Podcasting, Productivity, Apple, Freeware

Exporting iTunes playlists - an update

by Jason Clarke Feb 18th 2007

Back in early January I wrote a post called Exporting iTunes playlists to non-iPods? - Ask DLS. At the time, it turned out that there wasn't a good replacement for the tool I had been using to move both playlists and the actual sound files to my non iPod MP3 player. Now there is.

Many readers suggested iTunes Export as the tool I ought to use to accomplish my task, but at the time it didn't support copying files. However Eric Daugherty, the author of iTunes Export, was monitoring our discussion and decided to add the functionality I'd requested. He requested a more complete description of the features I was looking for, then allowed me to test a beta version once he had it working. I have to say that although the beta version was not feature complete, it worked perfectly for my purposes straight away.

Now Eric has released a new version of iTunes Export that allows you to choose between the original functionality (simply copying playlists) and now the opportunity to copy playlists including all of the song files. It works great. Thanks Eric!

Tags: Ask DLS, AskDls, copying playlists, CopyingPlaylists, iTunes, iTunes Export, ItunesExport, playlists

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Eric Daugherty said 11:50AM on 2-18-2007

Glad I could help!

adam said 1:27PM on 2-18-2007

i'm glad to hear that there really are developers out there who listen to the end users. a lot of times it seems like developers will ask for suggestions but then just kind of ignore them.

Jared C. said 1:58PM on 2-18-2007

I know this has nothing to do with the article, but I wish Apple would bring back the green iTunes icon. I know blue matches their color scheme, but green just looked so much cooler.

jason said 6:17PM on 2-20-2007

I made something similar a few months ago that's open source called iTunes Playlist Copier. It turns out you can simply drag-drop the content of your playlists to a folder or drive from within iTunes, but the program I wrote does reorder the track filenames with numbers and let you format what you want the new track filenames to be.

Check it out at http://www.worldsworstsoftware.com/software.html

Like i mentioned, It's open source, and written in Java with some fairly extensible code on the data side, so It may be useful as a starting point for other like-minded apps.

mrjason said 6:20PM on 2-20-2007

Oh. Also itunes playlist copier is cross-platform, it'll work on OS X 10.3+.

M3U file generation could easily be built into the codebase if people want that feature.

pyro-yoyoer said 6:39PM on 3-05-2007

Hey. I must say, this program is awesome. My only question is that when I export music to my memory card, it doesn't export the genre, artist, or album information. I am using the music in a Motorola SLVR phone.

Any help would greatly be appreceated

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