iTunes Playlist Hacks on Windows
These easy tricks will help you import, export, copy, and move playlists around one or more computers.
UPDATE: These techniques no longer work 'as is' in iTunes 8. It seems Apple has changed the format of its exported playlists. I have a work around in my next post .
All these examples will assume you're running Windows, but they should work just as well on Mac OS with only minor changes. I also must remind you that it is illegal to share copyrighted music and that these techniques will not work if your songs have DRM copy protection (i.e. were purchased through the iTunes store prior to January 6, 2009). Check out this press release from Apple if you don't know what I'm talking about.
Hack #1: Open Playlists in Excel
To export any iTunes playlist, simply right click and choose "Export Song List...". You can then save a text file containing all your playlist information. If you save this file to your desktop and double click it, you can see its contents in Notepad.
This mess of playlist information isn't too useful in its current form. iTunes allows you to import playlists from this file format (File > Library > Import Playlist...), but this only works if the filenames (including drive and folder path) are exactly the same. For most situations, you'll need more flexibility.
This file looks confusing, but it's actually very easy to manipulate. In fact, if you open it in Excel (or another spreadsheet application), the data will be neatly parsed into columns. (For the curious, this works because the file contains tab-separated values .) To open in Excel, make sure you display "All Files" in the Open dialog box (see the highlighted drop-down box in the image below). A wizard will pop up to help you import the file. You can just click Finish since the default options are fine.
Once in Excel, it's easy to strip out the unnecessary information, which for our purposes is everything but the file names. Saving the new file as "Text (Tab delimited)" will let you do some more work in Notepad.
Hack #2: Copy Songs to a Folder
This is a great trick to copy all song files in a particular playlist to another folder (for instance, on a thumb drive). Again, I'll remind you that you should only do this with music that isn't copyrighted.
If you followed the steps above, you'll be left with a text file containing a list of song filenames with one on each line. You can now use the Replace feature (Ctrl+H) to manipulate the file. Click the Replace All button to quickly make major changes.
Find what: C:
Replace with: copy "C:
Find what: .mp3
Replace with: .mp3" e:\playlist
You might need to run that second Replace multiple times if some of your files have extensions other than ".mp3" (such as ".aac").
Now you're left with a file with a bunch of lines that look something like this:
copy "C:\My Music\my-song.mp3" "e:\My New Playlist"
Folks who have been around PCs for a long time will recognize this as a DOS command and our new file as a batch file. Simply save this file with a ".bat" extension, double click the file, and Windows will automatically copy each of these files to your new folder. Don't be afraid of the black command line window that pops up.
Hack #3: Transfer Playlists to Your New Computer
I recently upgraded to Windows Vista and changed the location of where I store my music. Using Replace in Notepad, it's possible to update the filenames in your exported playlist.
Find what: C:\My Old Location\
Replace with: C:\My New Location\
Then you can simply save the file and import the playlist back into iTunes. Just go to File > Library > Import Playlist. This saved me hours of trying to recreate some really long playlists.
