Converting iTunes playlists with ruby

Just posting this here in case anyone else has a similar setup.

I've got an xbox running XBMC hooked up to my home stereo system, but all my music is stored and organised in iTunes. The folder containing the music is shared so the xbox can see it, so all my music is available in XBMC with no problems. The one thing I was missing is all my iTunes playlists.

Along with virtually every other music player, XBMC uses a standard .m3u text file format to define playlists. I think the '#EXT...' stuff is specific to XBMC, but I'm not sure.

Needless to say, iTunes is not compatible with this at all. But, it is possible to export a playlist from iTunes, in its own bizarre XML format

One quick ruby script later, and I can convert the iTunes XML to M3U, including a remapping of file locations because iTunes has a different name for the root music folder (in fact, it has 2 different names for it because I moved the folder once, but the older playlists seem to still use the original location, somehow. Hence the alternatives in the ITUNES_ROOT regexp).

Finally, a noddy bash script to convert all the .xml playlist files in a directory to .m3u and transfer them to the xbox using ncftp

I still have to right-click on my playlists in iTunes and choose 'Export Song List' for each one, but that's not too arduous. I could probably write an AppleScript or something to do that for me, but in my case it's not worth the extra effort.

If you find any of this stuff useful, please drop a note in the comments.

Cheers

David