[mythtv-users] New MythMusic + iTunes playlist importer script

Paulin paulin at spextreme.com
Sat Jan 10 20:19:43 UTC 2009


On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Brian Phillips <brian.phillips at gmx.net>wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> For a month or so I've been hacking at this code for my friend and I who
> are
> both running Myth systems.  It started out as the Perl script you see on a
> couple blogs and whatnot that maps your iTunes playlists into MythMusic.
>
> I wasn't happy with a couple of things that the script did, and so I
> started
> changing them here and there, and eventually most of the thing was gutted.
> My friend and I seem to like it, and he suggested I put it out there for
> others.
>
> Previous scripts have been more general in that they searched the MythMusic
> database for similar Artists and Song Name and Album and then they called
> that a match.  I didn't like this behavior for a couple reasons.  I could
> never get non-ascii characters in the ID3 tag to map properly.  The script
> would just give up on those songs.  Similarly, I have a few songs where the
> Album field is blank, but the Song Name and Artist are the same (different
> recordings, live shows, etc) and the previous scripts would simply match
> all
> these to the first finding of the song in the database.
>
> By matching on filename, we actually get the correct matches and the
> matching is much faster.  Instead of accessing the database once for each
> song in your iTunes library, it accesses the database once for the entire
> library.  We also don't have to worry about the ID3 tag containing
> "non-standard" characters, the songs will still map.
>
> A couple of gotchas though.  I'm no character encoding genius, in fact I'm
> probably a character encoding idiot, but from my little research for this
> project I noticed iTunes will store non-ASCII characters just fine as
> escaped hex values in the iTunes library XML file.  MythMusic, on the other
> hand, doesn't seem to store that information, being a Latin1 database.  I'm
> also a PERL idiot, so I never figured out how to change the data correctly.
> Basically, if you have non-standard characters in the actual filename,
> these
> songs will probably not map.  Sorry, but if someone knows how to do the
> proper conversions in Perl to make iTunes and MythMusic play nice, that
> would be a nice feature to add to the script.  Also, if you find my
> explanations to be bogus, just remember I might not know what I'm talking
> about.
>
> Also, while I really don't believe this will ever be a problem, I might as
> well disclaim it.  I've tested this script on my library (~1700 songs) and
> it works great.  However, because this loads some of the music_songs
> database into a Perl variable before it starts matching, the memory
> footprint of this script could be larger than the previous Perl scripts.
> I'm interested in how even the largest of music libraries perform with this
> script.
>
> Well enough banter, let me know what you think of the script!
>
> Brian
>

I haven't tried it yet but I think this could be pretty useful.  I have to
rework my iTunes stuff a little but hopefully I can try it.  I'll let you
know if I find anything.

On a related note may I recommend that you post this on the wiki under the
how to section.

Thanks for the script.
steve
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20090110/502b2aae/attachment.htm 


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list