I hadn’t really been following music much the last few years. I converted a good portion of my catalog to mp3 and even did some kazaa downloading for a bit a few years back but with so many channels and Cody and I disagreeing on what to listen to I just slipped away from music for a while. Except every year I get a nice box set of music I like for Yule / Christmas.

So anyway last week I got in the mood to hear something new and started looking into those newfangled legit (ie probably paying for it) music sites. I asked Cody what he uses. Got my friend Jocelyn to ask her friend what he uses. The consensus was itunes.

I’ve downloaded many songs now, unfortunately. And I’m probably going to move my 6.11 gigs of mp3s over so it can all be in one place. And like a good demi-exhibitionist with a weblog/journal I wanted a big fat list of my music to show how diverse my musical taste is. Heh. Right.

But itunes only exports lists in xml! I don’t do xml. :hiding her thrice-opened O’Reilly guide:

Remember I’m a kind of geek-by-association for the most part. Dad is an old-school geek, Cody is a geek, even Mom’s a bit of a geek, sister Nicole’s pretty geeky too. I was just an art school girl from hell that got a compaq in 1995 and got a bit addicted really. So consider me geek lite. Or hehe the Alice B Toklas of geeks sans mustache or the desire to cook very often.

I was utterly flummoxed by the xml thing and after a few unsuccessful searches I called Cody at work to ask if there was a standard aggregator program I wasn’t aware of. Apparently not. But (and this is the cool kind of stuff you get being married to a geek to counterbalance the dead weedy yard and unfixed car) he’d helped a friend a few months ago with a similar question about converting xml to txt or html and he could whip a little program in vb on his laptop in a few days.

He showed it to me yesterday and it’s pretty cool - it automatically goes to the default itunes folder and you can choose which fields you want in your list. You can export it as text, a full web page, or an html fragment if you just want to paste it into a page. He said in a few days after some polishing I can offer it for download here. Neat huh?