Apple’s iTunes software offers hundreds of ways to view and sort your media library but it can
be all things to all people. Sometimes you just want to get that data out of iTunes and then into
another program. Maybe you want to email a playlist to a friend or graph your listening habits in
excel. There are a couple ways to go about this but the most logical choice is a little misleading.
You'll find an option for exporting library data in the iTunes file menu but the result is a thorny
mass of XNL data isn’t easy to make sense of. Really the best way to get data out of iTunes is so
obvious that you might just kick yourself. It turns out you can copy and paste from iTunes
directly into another program. To do this, find the data you want to export. This can be a listing
of your complete music library, a playlist of your top rated TV episodes or even just the data
from a single song.
The copy command is only going to pick up the information we see on the screen. To get more
less data on your list, head to the iTunes view menu and look under view options. If you're just
emailing a playlist, you probably want to little the view down to just title, artist and album info.
Nut if you're really—for more song data, you can always find more options for things like
release date or even the record of the last time a song as played.
Once the list looks complete in iTunes, use the select all and copy commands from the iTunes
edit menu. Now open up the document that is going to receive the information. This could be an
excel spreadsheet, a text auk or even a Google spreadsheet. Hit paste and all your data will drop
in as a tab separated list. You'll need to go back in and add headers to label each column but
that’s really all there is to it.
Another handy trick you can use is the export your library to PDF. ITunes has all kinds of cool
printing options for making CD sleeves but they also have a full page album view for showing
off your entire library. On a Mac, the iTunes print dialog should offer the option o print this info
to paper to a PDF document. PC users can get the same PDF printing feature by heading over the
download.com and installing a free app called DuPDF.
Finally, for exporting your iTunes library data to the web, dustytunes.com will take that iTunes
XMLs file we talked about in the beginning of this video and transform it into a list you can
browse online and show with friends. So there you go, there are three ways to break library data
out of iTunes. For cnet.com, I'm Donald Bell.
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