The trouble with iTunes is, that all meta-data is stored in a database, which is not accessible to anyone but iTunes itself. The stored mp3 files are not tagged, unless they are already tagged by beforehand. iTunes can read these tags, but it does not add to them, when the metadata is edited.

In the current case, this leads to an iTunes database of mostly untagged files, which are wildly spread accross the users hard drive. To automatically clean up this mess, the file will do the following:

read am XML-dump of the iTunes library.
locate the files on the hard drive and copy them into a target folder.
read all the metadata from the iTunes library, and add id3-tags with the stored information to the copied files.
If the file is in wav or aiff format, which doesn't allow for tagging, convert it into flac.

This process is repeated for all files. If the file is not found on the hard drive, an entry in the logfile is found.

Dependencies

The solution will be a python script, and it will rely on several python libraries, that are available from pip. Most of these libraries are fairly standard, such as id3-tagging or XML parsing. They must be present on the target system to be used. This can be done by creating a venv for python3.

To create your virtual environment, do

python3 -m venv .venv

from within the root of this repository.

Then activate the environment, and install the requirements.

source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

And you're good to go.

Usage

To use the script, download it to the local machine, create the virtual environment as described under Dependencies and then you can run the script with the command:

python3 ./scraper.py --target <targetDirectory> <itunesLibraryFile>

where <targetDirectory> is the folder you want your new music collection to reside, and <itunesLibraryFile> is the name of the xml file containing your iTunes library data.