Songbird/Nightingale: Exporting playlists

The playlist problem

As mentioned in my previous post I have been using Songbird/Nightingale for quite some time, in spite of the drawback mentioned in the post.

No matter if using Songbird or Nightingale, one of my main problem still remained the same: The playlists are trapped somewhere inside the library with no way to export as playlist files. Absolutely no way? That’s not the whole truth, however, as there are (or were) addons like Playlist Export Tool, Export My Playlists or FolderSync. Thanks to the developers, by the way – those addons were really useful to me!

Unfortunately, with every new songbird release, all addons stopped working. In other words: Whenever I ~~made the mistake of updating~~ updated, I wasn’t able to export playlists anymore. I actually don’t even know if there are any addons left, that are compatible to the most recent version of Songbird.

The playlist solution

One more good thing about Songbird (and Nightingale as well), is that it uses an SQLite database. This allows for accessing the Songbird database from a variety of programming languages without getting your hands dirty and makes way for a “third-party” tool, that is capable of exporting playlists from the Songbird database and doesn’t depend on the Songbird version. I developed an exporter in Java and been using it some time to make my Songbird playlists available on my NAS.

As I thought this exporter might be useful to others, I refactored the quick and dirty source code and published it on GitHub. So now, I’m proud to present songbirdDbTools a Java-based playlist exporter for Songbird/Nightingale that was just released in its very first version. Hopefully, it will be of use for somebody else, who was missing this functionality as much as I did 🙂

The name is a bit of an exaggeration at this point, as the tool provides only the export functionality. However, I put some effort in designing songbirdDbTools to be as extensible as possible. I have a couple of things in mind that would be useful.
For example synchronizing playlists. That is, exporting not only the playlist but copy the member files as well. This might come handy for effectively synchronizing files to mobile devices.
Or finding zombies and ghosts (like the Excorcist used to do, three years ago). Another neat feature might be to find out all playlists a file belongs

If only I had more time!

So, just in case you’re interested in contributing: Fork songbirdDbTools on GitHub!