Here are some scripts and stuff I've written to make using iTunes music and/or iPod easier for Linux users. All the things described below are available in tzs-ipod-1.0.tar.gz [3127 bytes] (MD5 8a66a4635a3cf21ee90cd0cae9b73d7d, SHA1 ce38c2d509890721f3535ac4586eba07b6bc5a20), or, if you'd like it signed with my GPG key, here: tzs-ipod-1.0.tar.gz.gpg [3243 bytes]

There are three things included.

• music-playlist-maker.pl

  Given a copy of your iTunes library, this script generates a directory tree, organized by genre, artist, and album, that contains XMMS playlists for those albums. The basic idea is that you copy your iTunes tree from your Windows box (or Mac, I suppose) to your Linux box, and then run music-playlist-maker.pl, to set up playlists.

  You'll have to edit this script and change four variables to tell it where things are on your system:

  1. my $linux_tree = "/usr/local/share/iTunes". Change this to where on your Linux box you have copied your iTunes tree.
  2. my $playlist_dir = "/usr/local/share/lists-gen-from-itunes". This is where you want the XMMS playlist tree to go.
  3. my $hymn_wrapper = "/home/tzs/bin/hymn-cp.sh". Set this to a script to remove the DRM from protected AAC files, if you want to have them made available. This script should take two arguments: a protected AAC file, and the name of the unprotected file it is to create. I include such a script, named hymn-cp.sh, that uses a patched version of hymn to do the conversion. That patched version is described below.
  4. my $converted_files = "/usr/local/share/converted-music". This is where any protected AAC files that are stripped of their DRM are placed.

  If you would like the script to ignore protected AAC files, set $hymn_wrapper to "".

  Note that this script doesn't do anything with iTunes playlists. It would be nicer if it turned each of your iTunes playlists into an XMMS playlist. I don't use playlists in iTunes, so simply did not bother doing this.

  A special playlist will be made of all the protected AAC files. If you have a lot of them, that is probably pretty useless, but if you are like me, and the only protected ones you have are the weekly free iTunes download, plus the ones you got in the Pepsi song giveaway, this is a convenient way to get to all those songs (basically, it corresponds to the "Purchased Music" playlist from iTunes).

  You might see some messages about some files being possibly bad. What this means is that the script could not read them. This is usually harmless--the files are usually actually fine. (I think the problem has something to do with different legal charsets for filenames between Windows and Linux, or something like that).

• hymn-0.7.1.patch

  This is a patch for hymn-0.7.1, that will make it look at a hard-coded place for your iTunes key. If you want to use this, look at the patch, and change that hard-coded path to where you are going to keep a copy of your iTunes key, since the location and name probably aren't going to match mine. For information on how to copy your iTunes key from Windows, see the hymn documentation. NOTE: If your iPod is connected to your Linux box, I believe hymn can grab your key from there, so you won't need a patch.

• hymn-cp.sh

  A script to invoke my patched hymn to de-DRM a file. If you are using unpatched hymn with an iPod, you'll have to figure out what changes, if any, are needed to this, or write your own script.