Re: iTunes values and Music Library.xml
Re: iTunes values and Music Library.xml
- Subject: Re: iTunes values and Music Library.xml
- From: Dinu Gherman <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2002 08:52:11 +0200
Nathan Zamecnik:
Hello, I have a question that has left me stumped in iTunes. I am
going to
write a Cocoa program that will manipulate some things in iTunes such as
play counts, rating etc. To begin my testing I went into the iTunes
folder
in the music directory of my home and started playing around with some
values of things such as the rating. The file I was working with here
btw
is iTunes Music Library.xml.
Anyways, I would switch a songs Rating from a value of say 60 to 20.
When I
would write that file and look into iTunes the value did not change and
when
I reopened the file my values were still there. I figured that iTunes
needs
to re-read the file so I closed iTunes and reopened it and the old
values
were still in the playlist for iTunes even though when I reopened my xml
file only to see the values I put in where there. I tried this many
times
and when I would get info on a song in iTunes and hit OK it would then
write
what values it was using in the play list and write them to the xml
file.
My question then is this; where does iTunes read the real valued from
before
writing it to this xml file? I opened the iTunes package and saw
nothing
that would keep the values.
I have used the Propertylist Editor to open many files and have not
found
what I am looking for. Anyone know what file I should be looking to
edit in
order for iTunes to read the new values I have set for it?
I guess the XML file you're mentioning is created only in iTunes 3 and
only when synchronizing. I would not expect to see any changes to the
iPod database right after changing the XML file. This database is a
binary file named iTunesDB with pointers to the song files spread over
a directory. All this is not visible in the Finder, but only in a ter-
minal.
Understanding the binary file format will be surely big fun for you,
but some others have revealed most of the format; just search the net
for iTunesDB.
I've written a simple app that basically allows you to extract songs
from your iPod to a local drive and produce XML and PDF reports of
your iPod contents (this was before iTunes 3). The key bits are in
a Python source file. It does not cope with songlists, though:
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15530
There are many other apps doing similar stuff...
Regards,
Dinu
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.