Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Listing Songs
This basic script is adapted from one I present in my book Wicked Cool
Shell Scripts (see
http://www.intuitive.com/
wicked/
for the original iTunes script and much more), and it produces an attractive
list of albums and songs in the iTunes library:
#!/bin/sh # itunelist - list your iTunes library in a succinct and attractive # manner, suitable for sharing with others and using (with diff) # to ensure that you have synchronized iTune libraries on different # computers and laptops. itunehome="$HOME/Music/iTunes" ituneconfig="$itunehome/iTunes Music Library.xml" musiclib="/$(grep '>Music Folder<' "$ituneconfig" | cut -d/ -f5- | cut -d\< -f1 | sed 's/%20/ /g')" echo Your music library is at $musiclib if [ ! -d "$musiclib" ] ; then echo "$0: Confused: Music library $musiclib isn't a directory?" >&2 exit 1 fi find "$musiclib" -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 \! -name '.*' -print | sed -e "s|$musiclib/||"
That should look pretty familiar because we've added only a few lines to the previous script: One blocks tests to ensure that the iTunes library really is a directory, and the other, the last line, uses the powerful find command to produce a list of all entries two levels deep in the library file hierarchy (the mindepth and maxdepth values).
This will make more sense if you can see some output:
$ ./itunesinfo.sh Your music library is at /Users/taylor/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip Acoustic Alchemy/Red Dust & Spanish Lace Acoustic Alchemy/Reference Point Adrian Legg/Mrs. Crowe's Blue Waltz Al Jarreau/All I Got Al Jarreau/Heaven And Earth Alan Parsons Project/Best Of The Alan Parsons Project Alan Parsons Project/Eve Alan Parsons Project/Eye In The Sky ... etc etc...
A glance at the output shows that the way iTunes stores music is by artist, then album, then song name. That's exactly correct, as shown here:
$ ls "Al Jarreau/All I Got" 01 Random Act Of Love.mp3 02 Life Is.mp3 03 Never Too Late.mp3 04 Feels Like Heaven To Me.mp3 05 Lost And Found (Guest Vocal By Joe Cocker).mp3 06 Secrets Of Love.mp3 07 All I Got.mp3 08 Until You Love Me.mp3 09 Oasis.mp3 10 Jacaranda Bougainvillea.mp3 11 Route 66.mp3
Feel like an explorer yet? Here you can see that song titles are stored in files that are named as track# + song name + encoding type. For example, the song Random Act of Love is the first track on this album, and it's stored as an MP3 file. If I want to mail this song to someone, that's the file I'd attach, for example.
But back to the shell script. Because I can generate a list of artists and albums, it's much more useful to have a version of the script that lets me choose to list artists, artists + albums or artists + albums + song titles. We'll call these level 1, level 2, and level 3, respectively.
What's delightful is that 90 percent of the needed modifications are accomplished by simply changing the two occurrences of the digit 2 in the last line to a variable that's set by the command line. That line alone, modified, would look like this:
find "$musiclib" -mindepth $lvl -maxdepth $lvl \! -name '.*' -print | sed -e "s|$musiclib/||"
We now need to add some code earlier in the script that checks to see what level is specified on the command line, assigning the variable lvl appropriately, or using a default value of 2:
lvl=2 if [ $1 -gt 0 -a $1 -lt 4 ] ; then lvl=$1 fi
That's all we need. The default value is set, and then the first argument to the script is tested and used if it's between 1 and 3.
NOTE
An argument is a word specified after the command name on the command line. When you typed ls –l, the -l was an argument.
Let's run it and see what happens:
$ ./itunelist.sh 1 | head Your music library is at /Users/taylor/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ Acoustic Alchemy Adrian Legg Al Jarreau Alan Parsons Project alec finn Andreas Mock Andreas Vollenweider andy irvine & dary spillane Atlanta Symphony Orchestra $ ./itunesinfo.sh 2 | head Your music library is at /Users/taylor/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip Acoustic Alchemy/Red Dust & Spanish Lace Acoustic Alchemy/Reference Point Adrian Legg/Mrs. Crowe's Blue Waltz Al Jarreau/All I Got Al Jarreau/Heaven And Earth Alan Parsons Project/Best Of The Alan Parsons Project Alan Parsons Project/Eve Alan Parsons Project/Eye In The Sky $ ./itunesinfo.sh 3 | head Your music library is at /Users/taylor/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/01 Catalina Kiss.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/02 The Blue Chip Bop.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/03 Making Waves.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/04 With You In Mind.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/05 Bright Tiger.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/06 Ariane.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/07 Highland.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/08 Boulder Coaster.mp3 Acoustic Alchemy/Blue Chip/09 Hearts In Chains.mp3
We're close to being done with this! All that's left is that I want to strip out the .mp3 filename suffix to make the output a bit more pleasant-looking. This is easily done with a second substitution command for the sed command, substituting the old pattern mp3 with a new pattern of nothing. Here's the last line of the script, modified as needed:
find "$musiclib" -mindepth $lvl -maxdepth $lvl \! -name '.*' -print | sed -e "s|$musiclib/||" -e "s/\.mp3//"
One more shot at listing song names, but this time, let's see how many include the word Dog by piping the output of the script to grep, rather than head:
$ ./itunelist.sh 3 | grep Dog Alan Parsons Project/Eve/02 You Lie Down With Dogs Andreas Vollenweider/Book Of Roses/06 In Doga Gamee Elvis Presley/The Number One Hits/03 Hound Dog Steve Tibbetts/Fall Of Us All/02 Full Moon Dogs
And next, let's see just how many different songs are in my iTunes library, this time using the wc word count utility:
$ ./itunelist.sh 3 | wc -l 3798
3798 songs! No wonder I don't have as much disk space as I'd like!