Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/apparebit/tracklist

print inventory of macOS Music.app library, one track per line
https://github.com/apparebit/tracklist

inventory jxa macos music music-app property-list tracklist

Last synced: about 2 months ago
JSON representation

print inventory of macOS Music.app library, one track per line

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
# @grr/tracklist



Print all tracks in the library of the Music.app in macOS.



This command line tool sorts tracks by artist, album, and track name without

regard for case or diacritics and then prints a line with the artist, album, and

track name for each track.



## How to Install & Run



To use `@grr/tracklist`, you need to first install the tool and supporting code.

Since we are installing into a newly created directory, `npm` complains about a

lack of manifest and lockfile. You can ignore that.



```sh

mkdir inventory

cd inventory

npm install @grr/tracklist

```



Once installed, you can run `@grr/tracklist` in two different ways corresponding

to two very different ways of accessing the track data. First is access to track

data by scripting the Music.app itself. Luckily, we don't have to fall back onto

AppleScript but can use JavaScript instead:



```sh

osascript -l JavaScript ./node_modules/@grr/tracklist/tracklist.js

```



Second is access to track data through an XML property list that captures a

library's metadata. In this case, we parse the property list with

[expat](https://libexpat.github.io), a streaming XML parser. As the code in

[parse.js](parse.js) illustrates, correctly handling callbacks can get rather

involved. At the same time, it enables us to ignore irrelevant data in the

library's property list and thereby avoid building the corresponding object

graph only to discard it again.



```sh

node ./node_modules/@grr/tracklist/tracklist.js 

```



The JXA and XML versions co-exist in the same module, since both versions sort

and print a tracklist the same. For that to be possible, the XML version does

not use static imports and uses the dynamic `import()` form only indirectly,

i.e., by dynamically creating a function that imports a module. Otherwise,

`osascript` would reject the module.



## Background



I wrote `@grr/tracklist` when I encountered problems migrating my music library

onto a new Mac. Since I store the actual tracks on a networked drive, I was

trying to simply import the `Library.xml` I had previously exported on the old

machine. That worked for the most part. Though Music.app notified me that it

couldn't import some tracks. Since my library contains well over 27,000 tracks,

that error message was exceedingly unhelpful. Clearly, I needed some tool to

compare the two libraries. The data in such an exported `Library.xml` file is in

Apple's generic property list format. That makes it unsuitable to textual

comparison (`diff`). In theory, Apple's property list tool `plutil` can convert

XMl-based property lists to JSON. But in practice, the tool refuses to convert

Music.app libraries because JSON lacks support for dates. Hence I wrote my own

tool.



Once I started `diff`-ing the output produced with `@grr/tracklist`, the reason

for Music.app dropping tracks became apparent: The metadata for all dropped

tracks differed from other tracks by the same artist or on the same album only

in capitalization. That can be problematic when deriving file names from

metadata, as Music.app does, since macOS defaults to case-preserving file

systems while my networked disk, which runs Linux, has a case-sensitive file

system. It actually speaks to the software quality of iTunes that this hasn't

caused any issues before. Since library import doesn't handle this correctly, I

fixed the metadata and file names to have the same consistent casing on my old

machine. I did the same normalization for quotes and diacritics. Thereafter, I

reset Music.app to a blank slate (by starting the application with the option

key pressed and selecting a fresh library directory) and imported the library

without a hitch.



---



__@grr/tracklist__ is © 2020 Robert Grimm and licensed under [MIT](LICENSE)

terms.