iTunes playlist as text?

October 31, 2006 9:49 AM

iTunes filter: I'm trying to get a text file of a playlist in itunes...any way to do this?

Got my friend an iPod and pre-loaded it with her favorite tunes and shipped it to her. Her iTunes was set to auto-update and she lost all the tunes I had put on it, so now I'm sending her cds of the music. I want to include a list of all the songs. Is it possible to do what I want? I'm willing to download a program to do so if necessary.

posted by ellebee to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

Select all the songs in the playlist and hit copy (regular old control-c or command-c depending on your OS). Paste into your editing program of choice.

If you want only certain fields, you can do Edit > View Options (at least, that's the menu command on a Mac) and make visible whichever columns you want in the list.
posted by bcwinters at 10:04 AM on October 31, 2006

File -> Export
Select "Plain Text" as the format and save.

You can also print playlists as PDFs (on Macs and probably PCs as well).
posted by lekvar at 10:05 AM on October 31, 2006

File, Export?
posted by nathancaswell at 10:05 AM on October 31, 2006

after exporting as described above, you can also import the resulting file into excel to better organize the song lists. I think you need to import as comma-separated, not sure, just experiment with the different types delimiters in the excel import dialog box until you get the desired result. I have done this successfully in the past.
posted by cahlers at 10:25 AM on October 31, 2006

File > Print will print you a snazzy, nicely-formatted list of whatever you have selected in iTunes. You can even print a custom size to fit into a jewel case.

Important: Make sure you burn the songs in their native format, not as a regular audio CD, like so:

iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Burning > Data CD

Then, when your friend imports the songs back into iTunes, she'll still have all the identifying information attached to each track, and she won't even need your list. If you send her regular audio CD's, it will take about 10 times as many discs, the sound quality will go down when she re-imports them, and she'll have a bunch of songs with names like "Track 12 - Unknown Artist".
posted by designbot at 10:34 AM on October 31, 2006 [2 favorites]

Oooh, I didn't know about the "data cd" trick! Thanks for that, designbot!
posted by lekvar at 11:01 AM on October 31, 2006 [1 favorite]

If you're using a Mac, you can very likely find an AppleScript to do what you want here.
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:32 PM on October 31, 2006

Why not submit the track lists to CDDB or Gracenote, and then when she puts the CDs in her computer, they will already have all of the information?

It's in one of the iTunes menus at the top: "Submit CD Track Names," or something like that.
posted by owl at 7:34 AM on November 1, 2006