How to Export Song Lists From iTunes

Learn how to get lists of songs out of iTunes to share with friends or to import into other programs.

Apple’s iTunes software offers hundreds of ways to view and sort your media library but it can be all things to all people. Sometimes you just want to get that data out of iTunes and then into another program. Maybe you want to email 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 mass of XNL data isn’t easy to make sense of. Really the best way to get data out of iTunes is so obvious that you might just kick yourself. It turns out you can copy and paste from iTunes directly 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 less data on your list, head to the iTunes view menu and look under view options. If you're just emailing a playlist, you probably want to little the view down to just title, artist and album info. Nut if you're really—for more song data, you can always find more options for things like release date or even the record of the last time a song as 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 auk 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 the export your library to PDF. ITunes has all kinds of cool printing options for making CD sleeves but they also have a full page album view for showing off your entire library. On a Mac, the iTunes print dialog should offer the option o print this info to paper to a PDF document. PC users can get the same PDF printing feature by heading over the download.com and installing a free app called DuPDF. Finally, for exporting your iTunes library data to the web, dustytunes.com will take that iTunes XMLs file we talked about in the beginning of this video and transform it into a list you can browse online and show with friends. So there you go, there are three ways to break library data out of iTunes. For cnet.com, I'm Donald Bell.