How to ftp contents of a smartplaylist in iTunes (os/x)

April 5, 2011 10:07 PM

Mac: How can I ftp the contents of a smart playlist in iTunes on a scheduled (daily) basis?

So I have been trying to find a solution to this problem for a while.
Basically I subscribe to several premium (costly) podcasts, and I have a great smart playlist I use when I am home to listen to all of the new ones. (All new ones in the last 24 hours). (They are all related to politics and current events)

Now I subscribe to a lot of other podcast that I listen to less frequently and dont care about. So its not all new podcasts in the last 24 hours.

All I want is some process, or task I can schedule to look up the contents of the smart playlist once a day, and takes each file that is in the playlist and ftps it to specific directory.

I dont want to put the mac that has iTunes on it, directly exposed/accessible from the internet.


Here is what I tried so far:

- Subsonic, this works really well for playing my music remotely, but it lacks smart playlists.
- AudioGalaxy, I dont like it.
- Transmit + Manual selection of folders, scheduled to upload, This is ok but it requires manual editing every time I update my smart playlist list
rather the process is totally separate from my smart playlist
- Kavasoft Kava Tunes: Does not work for me.
- SuperSync, didnt work for me.

posted by digividal to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Response by poster: If somebody knows of a Ruby library that can read the contents of a smart playlist and get the list of involved mp3 files, I can do the rest of the script to ftp the files.
posted by digividal at 10:18 PM on April 5, 2011

How about syncing your smart playlist to Dropbox?
posted by blishlut at 10:45 PM on April 5, 2011

Response by poster: blishlut: well I can certainly synch it to dropbox. How do I schedule this activity daily?
posted by digividal at 10:59 PM on April 5, 2011

I'm not sure whether this would work — it'll depend on the criteria for your Smart Playlist — but you might look into using Smart Folders in the Finder instead of Smart Playlists. Some (but not all) of the criteria for a Smart Playlist can be duplicated in the Finder to create a Smart Folder that contains the corresponding audio files (look under the "Other..." menu when you're creating the folder.) You could then use your third option above to upload the files in the Smart Folder once a day.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:04 AM on April 6, 2011

The first piece of the puzzle is scripting the action of copying files from iTunes to another directory. The place I would usually start looking for something like this is Doug's Applescripts for iTunes. Taking a quick look around, I don't see anything that'll quite do what you want, but with some experimentation and hacking, you could probably bodge this one into a script that will copy all tracks in a given playlist to a given folder.

If the target folder syncs to dropbox, that solves another part of the puzzle. And I think you could make it work with Transmit.

Then you need to schedule the running of the script. There are a lot of ways to do that. A lot of macro programs can do it. You could create a daily recurring event in iCal that launches the script. I use Lingon to set a launchd event that runs my daily scripts—if you really want to get down and dirty, you can set the launchd event directly in the terminal (don't ask me how).
posted by adamrice at 7:54 AM on April 6, 2011

This recent comment might be relevant. So maybe iTunesFS to expose the playlist as a directory in the filesystem, then dropbox or FTP from there?

(Not a Mac user myself, just remembered that comment flying past and thinking "oh that's clever".)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:42 AM on April 6, 2011

This.

Get iTunesFS up and running, then set up a cronjob to rsync (be sure to add flags -delete --ignore-existing) the playlist over to the destination.

One more thing, I would set iTunesFS to strip the playlist numbers from the files to help prevent rsync from uploading the same files again if the playlist order changes (unless play order is important). You can do this by running the following in the terminal:

defaults write com.mulle-kybernetik.znek.iTunesFS PlaylistsTrackFormat "'%(name).%(ext.lowercaseString)'"
posted by mullingitover at 1:23 PM on April 6, 2011

Response by poster: I was very excited to read about iTunesFS it seemed like a great option.
So far I have not been able to get it running.
It might be b/c my iTunes library is so big. 2.7TB
posted by digividal at 8:05 PM on April 6, 2011