If you're burning CDs in iTunes and want to create printable song lists to slide into CD jewel cases, you'll find that the Advanced -> Export Song List menu item doesn't generate anything usable without massive editing. There are two ways to get usable text files out of iTunes for this purpose.
1) The Easy Way.
This seems obvious in retrospect, but I didn't notice it was possible until I had already gotten it solved the hard way ;) Select your playlist in iTunes and use Edit -> View Options to enable only the fields you want exported to your text file (I usually keeps tons of fields visible, but don't need them for CD jackets). Now drag the column headers into whatever order you prefer. Hit Cmd-A to Select All, Cmd-C to copy. Go to BBEdit, Word, or other text app and paste. The pasted data will exactly mirror your visible fields and column orders. Format and print.
2) The Hard Way.
Before I realized there was an easy way to do this, I wrote to macosxhints reader njitkoff to see if there was an AppleScript solution for this. Within an hour, he sent me the following AppleScript, which exports a good default selection of fields to a text file. The nice thing about using the script method is that you can jimmy it to produce exactly the formatting you want, and you don't have to mess with your current arrangement of fields and column orders in iTunes.
1) The Easy Way.
This seems obvious in retrospect, but I didn't notice it was possible until I had already gotten it solved the hard way ;) Select your playlist in iTunes and use Edit -> View Options to enable only the fields you want exported to your text file (I usually keeps tons of fields visible, but don't need them for CD jackets). Now drag the column headers into whatever order you prefer. Hit Cmd-A to Select All, Cmd-C to copy. Go to BBEdit, Word, or other text app and paste. The pasted data will exactly mirror your visible fields and column orders. Format and print.
2) The Hard Way.
Before I realized there was an easy way to do this, I wrote to macosxhints reader njitkoff to see if there was an AppleScript solution for this. Within an hour, he sent me the following AppleScript, which exports a good default selection of fields to a text file. The nice thing about using the script method is that you can jimmy it to produce exactly the formatting you want, and you don't have to mess with your current arrangement of fields and column orders in iTunes.
tell application "iTunes" to set {theArtists, theNames, theTimes, theAlbums} ¬
to {artist, name, time, album} of every track of view of front window
set theFile to open for access (choose file name) with write permission
repeat with i from 1 to count theArtists
write ("" & item i of theArtists & " - " & (item i of theAlbums) & " - " & ¬
(item i of theNames) & " (" & (item i of theTimes) & ")" & return) to theFile
end repeat
close access theFileTake your pick of methods; they both work well!
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