How in the Tech

Exporting iTunes Playlists with iExporter

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 25, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Apple, Multimedia

iTunes is likely the top music library manager available for Windows and OS X, unfortunately it’s generally not because of the quality of the product – especially on the Windows platform. Rather, the iPod’s dominance in the portable music player market dictates iTunes success. Savvy users may be aware that the iPod is not exclusively bound to iTunes but for the general populace it’s the only application in town. iTunes works well enough that most don’t actively seek out alternatives but that also isn’t typically a glowing endorsement of the product either.

A glaring omission in iTunes’ functionality is the inability to export all of your playlists, at least in a usable fashion, to other devices – devices that can’t directly interface with iTunes. If you are someone who has taken hours to construct the perfect playlist for every possible occasion this can be quite a drag when you hit this wall. Thankfully, with each problem there often exists a solution and here is one where that rings true.

iExporter is a free Windows .NET application that interfaces with iTunes and facilitates the exporting of any and all assembled playlists. It’s usage is as straightforward as one would suspect; launch the application and click Connect to iTunes. The software will query a running iTunes instance or launch iTunes if isn’t already running. Secondly, select a folder you wish to export the playlist to. It is unfortunate that iExporter can not export a .m3u playlist; the software will simply copy the MP3 files referenced in the selected playlists into the folder of your choosing from step 2. For some, this oversight could be a deal breaker but also something that hopefully can be solved in future releases.

iExporter does the job with little frills, which is generally something I like to see in a product.