Simmons Consulting, the Website of Toby Simmons

iSyncTunes — Windows script to keep iTunes up to date

09
Jun

I am begrudgingly making the move from Winamp to iTunes and it kinda makes me sad. Winamp is a great music player, but one thing it doesn’t do well is play iTunes-purchased music. There is a plugin that enables it to do this, but I have found it to be rather buggy. For example, sometimes when browsing the Internet while a song was playing, the music would start to stutter and sound choppy until I stopped and restarted playback. iTunes doesn’t have this problem.

One of the things that I really miss about Winamp is its ability to completely rebuild your media library from scratch by rescanning your music folders. In Winamp, you just set up your “watched” folders. Then, if you have moved, deleted or added music files, you simply tell Winamp to rescan your folders and it updates your library appropriately.

There is no built-in simple way to do this in iTunes.

I have seen several cool Windows scripts that folks have created for doing some of the parts of library maintenance, but nothing that did everything, especially the hard part of scanning folders for media files and checking to see if they exist in the iTunes library. Since this was such a valuable feature in Winamp, I decided to put one together.

I cannot take full credit for this because parts of my script are built on other people’s work including Otto’s.

If you too are being resigned to use iTunes but miss this feature of Winamp, give my script a try.

Comments (4) »

  1. Chris says:

    Nice script. Do you have an equiv. for Mac?

  2. Toby Simmons says:

    Sorry, I do not. I have written a few AppleScripts, but since the iTunes hooks are so different between the platforms, I don’t think there is an easy way to translate my script from Win to OSX.

  3. Pit says:

    And how I can used or install it?

  4. Toby Simmons says:

    First download the script (you might need to right click the link and select “Save As”) then you will need to run it from a command prompt, using a command something like:

    cscript iSyncTunes.js

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