57. Export a Song List BEFORE YOU BEGIN 34 Create a Playlist SEE ALSO 52 Create an Audio CD from a Playlist 58 Share Your Music over the Local Network You can use iTunes to save a list of songs in a portable text format. The reasons for doing this might not be immediately clear, but if the need ever does arise, you'll be thankful for the ability. One example might be that someone wants to know what songs you're burning onto a CD for a mutual friend's birthday party; exporting the song list to a plain text file is a great way to make this information available without having to copy every track name down manually. No doubt you can imagine many other sets of circumstances in which you'd be quite glad not to have to recite track names over the phone or scribble them down on a piece of paper. 1. | Choose the Playlist to Export Choose a playlist , a CD, the library, or any other aggregation of music from the Source pane in the iTunes' window. Organize the song listing in the way you want it to be exportedsort the songs on the column of your choice, or drag them manually into the order you want them in. | 2. | Export the Song List Choose File, Export Song List . This command brings up the Save dialog box. 57. Export a Song List Navigate to the location on the disk where you want to save the output file (the format of the navigator depends on your operating system) and specify a filename. This name is initially set to match the name of the playlist or the music source you selected in step 1, but you can type a new name to replace it. | 3. | Choose an Output Format You can export the song list in Plain Text or XML format; on the Mac, you can additionally use Unicode Text format, which is useful for song names written in non-Western character sets (such as Japanese, Russian, or Hebrew). Choose the format appropriate to your needs. | 4. | Save the Song List File Click Save . The exported song list is saved to your selected location in the format of your choice. If you saved in Plain Text mode, the contents are tabular, with cells representing every info tag in every file in the listing, each separated by tab characters . If you saved in XML format, the fields are all delineated in standard XML data containers which can be imported using any database application that can read XML format. | NOTE Saving a song listing in XML format is a good way to back up your song information. Another, more comprehensive, method is to choose File, Export Library ; this command saves the contents of your entire iTunes Library database (not the music itself!) in XML format, in much the same way as this task describes. Be sure to save your Library.xml file in a safe placeyou might need it! See 97 Restore Your Music Library Database from a Backup Copy for more. |