Due to loniless, I bought an iPod. Looks good and works. It's nice to listen to music again. Didn't do this much lately. Only problem: iTunes drives me crazy. Maybe slightly more than my other media players. Perhaps the time has come to deal with the problem?

Of course, forcing me to use iTunes is what reminds of the Sony desease. You remember the old days with minidisc when there was almost no way to get wave or any non-proprietary format out of those otherwise farily ok gadgets? Well, of course, it's the attempt to monopolize the market to earn more money. Anyways, I thought I give it a try since there are iPods with wireless now...

So, I import my mp3 in iTunes. Fine, takes forever, but works. Now I have a problem that  others must have all the time: creating some order my library: dead links, duplicate files, missing Album Art etc. I think, by now I tried everything that iTunes has to offer out of the box: AlbumArt download, consolidating my library etc. Maybe these functions are not bad actually, but the fact is that I am still far away from a decent order. Of course, I don't clean everything by hand. I do this at work already...

My idea was that there are millions of iTunes users with the same problems. There are, but there are not as many solutions on the web as I have thought. With a windows machine at home, I cannot use AppleScript or other mac software. This rules out about half of the community, I guess.

There is a javascript interface, obviously that looks interesting: Right now I am checking this out. More information:

• http://developer.apple.com/sdk/itunescomsdk.html (includes documentation of the sdk com)
• http://ottodestruct.com/blog/2005/10/20/itunes-javascripts/

Maybe I also give perl a try:

• http://www.cyberrazor.com/2006/07/06/scripting-itunes-with-perl-part-1/
• http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=517

This should solve the problem with dead links.

My next problem seems to be duplicates. Using iTunes to rule over my files, the duplicates that are most annoying are those residing next to each other on the hard disk: It seems that the naming convention is like this:

iTunes/Performer/Album/Track.mp3
iTunes/Performer/Album/Track 1.mp3

If I find two of these files with identical MD5 checksum or even the same size, it should be safe to delete one of them. Maybe dupe finder does it, but why should I pay for this? Not really sure.

Looks interesting, but not my problem at the moment:

• http://hinchley.net/2009/02/08/using-javascript-and-the-itunes-com-sdk-t...
• http://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/Python/iTunes/

Let's see what comes out of this... At least, I forgot that I am lonely.