Playlister

In the past couple months, I’ve had an ongoing series on converting iTunes playlists to text files, with a brief digression into scripting with Swift. While I doubt that I’m entirely done with the topic, I have reached a point where I’m ready enough to do another write-up.
This morning, I made playlister available to the public. It is not a consumer-facing application like my others; it is very much a tool for people who are comfortable with the command line.
In between the previous iteration of this tool and the current, I actually had a version of playlister built and shareable (Chase has that version installed on his Mac, actually) but, before releasing it to the public, I looked at the code and thought “I can do better.”1
So I buckled down and spent some time indulging in my love for API design, and tried some tricks I’ve been wanting to try.
The rewritten version ships with a library, LibPlaylister, that provides the basic ideas — protocols that allow for interacting with the library, playlists, and tracks; conversion to Markdown — as well as some neat new tricks. There’s some hooks for customization, such as the RatingFormatter protocol, and included FiveStarRatingFormatter, and the new LinkStore protocol, which provides a layer of abstraction on the SQLite-based caching of links.2
It was also an excuse to add to my Swift toolbox. I worked with SwiftCLI for a while, and then converted to ArgumentParser when that was released. I’ve done file interactions, and a lightweight database. I’ve learned a lot about Swift Package Manager.3 I learned a bit about XCTest, and figured out how to get it working in GitHub Actions. (And, more interestingly, figured out how to conditionally include frameworks in an SPM package. I wanted the tests running on Linux, but Linux… doesn’t have the iTunesLibrary framework, shockingly.)
I had fun building this, and will probably continue to tweak it. (I mean, it could be fun to get it automatically pulling links from the iTunes Search API, and just asking ‘is this the right link?’ instead of requiring manual entry.4)
For now, though, it’s ready enough to share, and made for a fun write-up and a good way to de-stress by tinkering.

Interesting aside from giving that to Chase: Did you know that macOS has a ‘quarantine’ flag it puts on executables sent via AirDrop? That was some fun googling to figure out. The solution: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ./playlister ↩

That caching is definitely the biggest productivity gain of this, as compared to the previous version — now, when I go to write up my monthly playlist, the whole first part of the playlist doesn’t require any interaction at all. ↩

Coming from working with nom’s package.json format at work, SPM Package.swift files are nice. Like, you can have comments in them! And, more, you can have actual code, so you can do neat stuff like this. ↩

Although, at that point, I’d probably wind up writing it up as a SwiftUI app so I can show images. Which… might have been part of the inspiration for making LibPlaylister a separate library. ↩