Free Candy For Everyone

I have a reasonably large music collection, probably around 35 gigs. I really like listening to music while I work, so I like to keep my most up-to-date music library at work. This is the iTunes I sync my iPhone to and the one that has all my song ratings and the play counts from my years at the job.

Unfortunately, I changed jobs recently and risked losing all my play count and ratings info. I’d tried to keep copies of all new songs I got on both my work machine and my home machine, but it was hard to be sure what was missing on one machine or the other. And come on, the play count info! Also, I had lots of playlists I wouldn’t want to lose on my work copy of iTunes. And the way iTunes stores playlists provides no simple import/export functionality.

I started at a new job in December and imported a backup of my home iTunes library from 2007. I was missing all the music I’d added since then, I was missing all my ratings and play count info. For a while I’d been wanting to write a tool to sync info from multiple iTunes libraries. The implosion of my gadgets over my vacation left me with some time on my hands, so I decided it was time to write this program.

Introducing iTunesLibraryEdit. It’s a Windows only program written in C#, which means you might need to have the .NET Framework installed, if it doesn’t work.

Features:

• Compare your local iTunes library with any iTunes Music Library.xml file
• Display songs in your local library not in the remote one, and songs in the remote library not available locally
• Copy local songs not in a remote library to a folder for easy isolation and transfer to a removable drive
• Copy ratings, play count and playlists from remote library to local iTunes with live updating of iTunes

So far I’ve only tried it on Vista. I’ll be bringing it to work tomorrow to update my work library and make sure that it works on XP as well. Hope someone else enjoys this, I had a lot of fun writing it and learned a bunch about C#.

Note: You have to manually copy the iTunes Music Library.xml file to the other machine for comparisons. I don’t do any crazy interweb magic. You can usually find this file in your user music folder, something like c:\Documents and Settings\Tara\My Music\iTunes

When I recently put together my secret plan file, I had gotten back in to climbing. I was just freshly back into it, and climbing 5.7s. I needed a goal, a lofty goal, to add to my list, and 5.10 sounded ambitiously far away. Well, I climbed a 5.10 for the first time a few weeks ago. Yay! Mission accomplished? Never!

I should explain - rock climbing uses a rating scale that you can read about on Wikipedia. If you’re too lazy to clickthrough, here’s a quote:

Currently, according to the climbing textbook Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, the system divides all hikes and climbs into five classes:

• Class 1: Hiking.
• Class 2: Simple scrambling, with possible occasional use of the hands.
• Class 3: Scrambling, a rope can be carried but is usually not required.
• Class 4: Simple climbing, with exposure. A rope is often used. Natural protection can be easily found. Falls may well be fatal.
• Class 5: Technical free climbing. Climbing involves rope, belaying, and other protection hardware for safety.

All gym climbing is of class 5. Then, they add a number after the 5 to more precisely indicate its difficulty. There’s some degree of subjectivity in the ratings systems, so climbs at one gym might be much harder/easier than those of the same rating at a different gym. That said, the gym I climb at tends to rate on the harder side.

Of course, I’m never really done getting better at climbing. So instead, I just raised my goal, someday I’ll climb a 5.11!

It’s the entire Bible, translated into lolcat. It kinda hurts to read it, but in a good way. Who would want to miss out on gems like:

An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, teh good enouf for releaze as version 0.8a. kthxbai.

Sometimes I really love the internet.

It’s election day, so if you’re a U.S. citizen I really hope you’re registered to vote! Don’t forgot to get out there and exercise your rights. I’m all set to go with a cheat sheet on my votes for all the California and San Francisco propositions. So don’t forget, alright?

Sort of a to-do list for life, I guess my rapidly approaching 30th birthday has me trying to figure out what are my must do things. The list is short right now, but I’ll add to it as I get inspired. Or you can feel free to make suggestions which I will feel free to ignore or not.

The plans live here.