Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV repairing itunes library

I've had to spend a bit of time on a fairly specialized app to repair a customer's itunes library - this was required because the user's files were scattered in about seven different major areas plus a smaller amount were completely random, including inside emails, trashcans, backup trees, and other odd places. (quite some time ago this user was told to turn off their "copy into library when importing" option, due to a small internal hdd)

Anyway, 1300 playlists and 37,000 tracks makes for 960gb of music and a 53gb, 1.2 million line itunes xml file. (thank you for being awesome, BBEdit!) Now that we have all the files in one place, itunes needs to get the message where all the files went. It doesn't even do you the courtesy of telling you it lost a file until you try to play it.

(no, "consolidate library" was NOT an option before we moved things - files were dragged kicking and screaming off REV disks, internal hard drives, multiple external hard drives, a malfunctioning NAS, and a malfunctioning RAID)

So this has required me to make something to fully parse the "write only" itunes music library xml file, do several FINDs in terminal to catalog the new drobo, and run a script to fix the pathnames in the xml, in preparation to do a wipe-and-playlist-import maneuver in itunes to read the xml back in. (very thankful that's an option) In addition to the gargantuan size of the library, somewhere around 45% of the filenames have unicode-encoded characters in them. (LOTS of foreign titles) So it's been quite a blast to code. Once this xml file is into itunes, we can do a real consolidate library and come back in I'd guess four or five days and it'll all be finished and purdy.

Gives me a new respect for the author of iPhoto Library Manager. Anyway, I was curious if anyone else has or does need this specialized tool, I can make it available if there are any takers. This guy was told by at least three people that what I'm doing right now was "impossible". And that's my favorite thing to code.