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Topic: HOW TO: iTunes to fb2k (Including statistics) (Read 3082 times) previous topic - next topic
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HOW TO: iTunes to fb2k (Including statistics)

I haven't seen this on this forum (search everywhere), so I've mangled together info from different resources along with what I know to write this HOW-TO on transitioning from iTunes (bleh) to foobar2000.

Firstly, to get your statistics working into FB2K install this component and read the documentation about it to get familiarised with it.
Google Links

Specs: foo_playcount v3.0.2, FB2K v1.3.16

BEFORE I START, TEST THIS ON A HANDFUL OF TEST FILES FIRST
IF YOU'RE NOT COMFORTABLE DOING IT FIRST TIME.

ALL OF THIS IS UNDOABLE UNLESS YOU ROYALLY MESS SOMETHING UP.
LIKE WRITING TO THE WRONG TAGS. SO MAKE A BACKUP IF YOU'RE UNSURE.

Quote
Hold onto your butts.
- guy in Jurassic Park



  • Open iTunes.
  • Go to the songs section (where it shows all your music, not your podcasts) OR do what I done and create a smartplaylist (See iTunes_All Music Smart Playlist.jpg) which contains all of your music
  • Start of by hiding any columns you don't need.
  • I've left the columns: Date Added, Plays, Last Played. (Rating & Love could also be left to exported also).
  • Sort by Name (Optional but easier on the eye to view items later on)
  • Ctrl+A then Ctrl+C (This will copy the info you see to memory)
  • Open the attached template Excel file (iTunes Music Stats Template.xls). In the 2nd tab, clear the contents and Ctrl+V.
  • Leave Excel for now.
  • Open up FB2K and go to menu: Library>Configure.
  • Here under music folders click add... and choose the path to your iTunes folder. (if you're unsure where this is, check in iTunes: Edit>Preferences>Advanced).
  • Add Music to the path shown in itunes. e.g. C:\PathSeenIniTunes\Music
  • Below in file type restriction: Add the mask: *
  • Hit apply and let FB2K do its thang.
  • Meanwhile, back in iTunes export the library as a playlist.
  • To do this go to menu: File>Export Playlist, enter your filename and save as filetype M3U.
  • Open that exported file in Sublime Text (Nope, Notepad++ won't work, at least in my case it didn't. You can try but it truncated the document when I went to convert the encoding in my particular case). LINK: https://www.sublimetext.com/
  • In SL go to menu: File>Save with encoding>UTF-8 with BOM. This step is very important to import items with non-ASCII characters.
  • Back in FB2K make sure your status for the iTunes music folder says monitoring.
  • Then go to Menu: File>Load Playlist and choose the reencoded M3U file.
  • Now you should have two equally matching AND sorting (very important) playlists in both iTunes and FB2K.



IF YOU DON'T HAVE THE SAME NUMBER OF FILES YOU'VE DONE SOME WRONG, SO WEED OUT THE MISTAKES AND TRY AGAIN.

IF SUCCESSFUL, CONTINUE...

DO NOT SORT BY COLUMN IN FB2K FROM NOW ON



  • Back in Excel, you're in tab two with the pasted info from iTunes.
  • Select each of the columns and paste to the relevant section of tab 1 in the Excel document.
  • I've created some formulas for the %play_count% column. It'll add a '0' automatically if you paste your plays info to column A.
  • Same for the %first_played% column. This is optional but I've calculated this by using the %last_played% date IF the %play_count% is 1 AND %added% IF the %play_count% is GREATER than that.
  • Make sure the dates are formatted as: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS e.g. 2013-03-24 05:25:00 to import to the values.
  • Now copy from below the %added% cell to the very bottom of your data. Again this should line up perfectly with your FB2K info (AS LONG AS YOU DIDN'T ACCIDENTLY SORT THE COLUMN IN FB2K)
  • Back in FB2K in your newly imported iTunes playlist.
  • Hit Ctrl+A>Right click>Properties>Tools (lower left corner)>Automatically Fill Values...
  • Select from the dropdown... Source: Clipboard: Line per track
  • Now type %added% into the Pattern fillbox.
  • Then click OK but do not exit the properties dialog.
  • Repeat steps 8-10 and copy the info separately from excel to this dialog for each of your stats. For me that was these 4: %added%, %first_played%, %play_count%, %last_played%
  • Once all off those are done click Ok to the properties dialog and wait for the info to be wrote to the files tags.
  • LAST STEP: Select all files>Right click>Playback Statisics>Import statistics from file tags.



et voilà. A fully transferred iTunes library.

To check this you can create a smart playlist in iTunes and an Autoplaylist in FB2K with plays and %play_count% respectfully with say '10' plays and compare the data in each playlist. If you've got the same info then you've made it.


This is all completly reversible if you make a mistake. Delete the relavent tags: %added%, %first_played%, %play_count%, %last_played%.
Uninstall the statistic component and reinstall to start over. You may have to delete the database file for the statistics plugin. So, please refer to the Forum thread for that. It's already mentioned how to do that.

The above can be repeated for your podcasts too. Just, process the iTunes podcast folder instead.

Thanks for the wonderful software, glad I changed over.
stevehero



Re: HOW TO: iTunes to fb2k (Including statistics)

Reply #2
Don't apologise for making things easier.