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>> Apple's iTunes software offers hundreds of ways to view and sort your media library; but it can't be all things to all people. Sometimes you just want to get that data out of iTunes and into another program. Maybe you want to e-mail a playlist to a friend or graph your listening habits in Excel. There are a couple ways to go about this but the most logical choice is a little misleading. You'll find an option for exporting library data in the iTunes file menu. But the result is a thorny mess of xml data that isn't easy to make sense of. Really the best way to get data out of iTunes is so obvious you might just kick yourself. Turns out you can copy and paste from iTunes into another program. To do this, find the data you want to export--this can be a listing of your complete music library, a playlist of your top rated TV episodes or even just the data from a single song. The copy command is only going to pick up the information we see on the screen. To get more or less data on your list, head to the iTunes view menu and look under view options. If you're just e-mailing a playlist, you'll probably want to whittle the view down to just title, artist, and album info. But if you're really jouncing for more song data, you can always find more options for things like release date, or even a record of the last time a song was played. Once the list looks complete in iTunes, use the select all and copy commands from the iTunes edit menu. Now open up the document that is going to receive the information--this could be an Excel spreadsheet, a text doc or even a Google spreadsheet. Hit paste and all your data will drop in as a tab separated list. You'll need to go back in and add headers to label each column, but that's really all there is to it. Another handy trick you can use is to export your library to PDF. ITunes has all kinds of printing options for making CD sleeves, but they also have a full page out in view for showing off your entire library. On a Mac, the iTunes print dialog should offer the option to print this info to paper or to a PDF document. PC users can get the same PDF printing feature by heading over to download.com and installing a free app called Do PDF. Finally, for exporting your iTunes library data to the web, Dustytunes.com will take that iTunes xml file I talked about at the beginning of this video, and transform it into a list you can browse online and share with friends. So there you go. There's three ways to bring library data out of iTunes. For cnet.com I'm Donald Bell.
