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 ($6 for 16gb = $0.37/gb) than by getting the storage space as part of an iPod ($139.99 for 16gb = $8.75/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 ignore. You just get the original file name.
To use the playlist_exporter (this script), you:
-
create a playlist(s) containing the songs / albums you want in iTunes
-
export the playlist as XML
- run playlist_exporter
bundle install
ruby playlist_exporter.rb process
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:
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