Tuningfork (or tf) is a perl script that will keep your iTunes music library in sync with an external mp3 library. Note that at present it uses Applescript to talk to iTunes and will therefore only run on OS X.
I personally rip all my cds to flac with
Max. Then, I use flac2mp3 to make mp3 copies of each
track. I then mount the library from a central server and use tuningfor
to keep my wife and my iTunes librarys up to date. At present tuningfork
keeps the library in sync as a number of references (by using the itunes
"don't copy track to library" option). I may change that in the future so
that I can travel with a copy of my library.
Please note that this is BETA software. Please send feedback
to mcrosby@metamadness.org
Installing tuningfork
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Download the current version here
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Tuningfork is a perl script. Edit the first line of the tf script to point to the version
of perl you would like to use. As shipped, it points to Fink's perl
(/sw/bin/perl) by default.
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You need a relatively recent version of Perl's XML::LibXML installed that
comes with
XML::LibXML::Reader
. Unfortunately, at least as of Leopard 10.5.3
the the version Perl that pre-installed on OS X does NOT come with this. You
can use cpan to install it (beware the libxml dependencies) but this is
a little messy. I suspect future OS X releases will catch up.
Instead, I have used the perl that comes with
fink with
success. Using this is a fairly straightforward operation: Install fink
and then do an install of libxml-pm588.
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You need to Change the $musicpath variable to the location of your library.
If you are mounting a remote disk, note that applescript shows some of it's age
these days. I have found some weird issues going over nfs mounts so I personally
ended up switching to using afp as a protocol, which work fine.
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I have had issues with accented characters which seem to be applescript
related. I am working on fixing them, but in the meantime, I have provided
a script at http://www.metamadness.org/mcrosby/files/clean.txt that can
help with that.
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iTunes must have "Copy files to iTunes Musicc folder when adding library"
turned OFF. A future version of tuningfork may support keeping copies in
sync as well.
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Copy the script somewhere in your path (~/bin or /usr/local/bin
are good choices) and run it from terminal. It should "just work".
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If you would like a manpage, please feel free to run pod2man (or pod2html,
or any other pod program).