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iTunes customization

I have a rather large music library (>100GB and growing) managed through iTunes and consisting of music purchased from the iTunes store, ripped CDs, and digitized LPs.

I have two questions the answers to which would help me in managing all of this music:

1. Is it possible to globally set the columns displayed in the list view? I know this can be done on a per-playlist basis but, as you can imagine, it takes a LOT of playlists to manage this much music. It would be helpful to tweak one knob in order to do this. I'm willing to use an unsupported technique to do so and take my chances with SW upgrades.

2. Similarly, is there any automatable way to get CDDB data (e.g. from an external source such as one of the many standalone apps that can accessCDDB data to maange a music library) and apply it, for example, to a digitzed verion of a LP? Same comment as above on unsupported mechanisms.

The question behind this is really how much of the iTunes library structure is open and/or documented? With that information, all sorts of user customizations might be possible. One can even imagine a world of iTunes plug-ins or custom actiona a al Photoshop.

TIA,

Stu

Dell XPS M2010, Windows XP Pro, dual processor

Posted on Dec 15, 2007 4:02 AM

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1 reply

Dec 15, 2007 7:06 AM in response to Stu Farnham

In response to 1, you say it takes a lot of playlists -- I have to ask "Why?". Have you tried using the Browser (View..Show Browser), and combined it with the search field?

As far as I know, even though Apple provides an extensive programmatic interface to iTunes, there is no way to set the columns displayed via a script or program.

For 2, here is one (non-free) program (it uses freedb, not the Gracenote CDDB):
http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm

The binary iTunes Library file (iTunes Library.itl) is not documented anywhere that I'm aware of, certainly not by Apple. The XML version (iTunes Music Library.xml) is mostly obvious, but it doesn't contain information about which columns to display. The information you are looking for is stored in "iTunesPrefs.xml" (in %APPDATA%/Apple Computer/iTunes). Unfortunately, this file is not documented either! 😟

The only official plugins for iTunes are visualizers. There are also plugins to extend Quicktime (e.g. to add support for different file formats). There is a plugin called MultiPlugin for skinning, but it is done via unsupported methods and doesn't work for all iTunes versions. It also has a tendency to crash iTunes, so I wouldn't recommend it.

iTunes customization

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