On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Nathan Torkington wrote: > Morbus Iff writes: > > The XML database, not that I know of. I was actually planning to as an > > example of testing an install of Perl 5.8.0 and expat/XML::Parser. There > > has been some work by brian d foy at <URL: > > http://sourceforge.net/projects/brian-d-foy/>, but this is with the native > > database, not the XML. > > Thanks for the pointer to Brian's work, Morbus and David. I admit to > being unclear on the difference between the XML and the binary files.
The XML wasn't part of the picture before iTunes3 came out a few weeks ago. My impression was that the XML database had superceded the binary one that iTunes[12] used, but apparently it's only there as a supplement to the older binary storage format. As I recall, brian d foy's iTunes library came out before iTunes3, so while I played around with it when it came out (and liked it), I'm not sure if it reflects the recentish XML stuff -- it seems like it might have worked right on the binary, but I forget now... > If I change the XML file while iTunes is running, it overwrites those > changes when iTunes quits. > > If I change the XML file then start iTunes, it overwrites those > changes. Thus suggesting that the XML representation is supplementary & secondary to the internal binary one. Yes, I think it's there as a backup. Incidently, another fun game -- probably not as useful now that brian's library is available -- is to go into iTunes & go through the menus to export your library. Under iTunes[12], this produced a tab-delimited data file that could be easily manipulated. The only catches are that, because the format has to be back compatible with the OS9 version of iTunes, the line endings are Maccish [no big deal] and fields with filenames use old style colon-delimited paths instead of Unix style slash delimited ones [also no big deal]. At one point I had a oneliner that could push data from this file into MySQL. Very easy. -- Chris Devers Have you ever seen Jack Valenti & John Ashcroft at the same time?
