Python and Rhythmbox

I've got a fairly large collection of digital music on a networked drive, and I access it from multiple machines on the network. I consolidated it 5 years ago when I started using iTunes, and over the past few years picked up about 400 songs from the iTunes store. This is something I avoid now, since Amazon offers songs at higher bitrates and without the crippling, non-Fair Use of DRM. (Apple seems to have recently changed it's policy, though the pain their DRM crap has caused me doesn't make me a very loyal customer.)

Since I started working at Canonical, I've been using Ubuntu f or more than just development – it's my main-use machine. I still use iTunes every once in a while, but my primary media player is Rhythmbox. There are a couple of issues with the old library, though.

Obviously, Rhythmbox can't play Apple's encrypted .m4p files or a couple audio book files I have. What's more, there are about 200 files that iTunes is able to locate but which Rhythmbox cannot (this may be due to the differing case sensitivities of the respective OSs). In order to track all these issues down conveniently, I wanted to export the import errors and missing files as a text file. Sadly, Rhythmbox doesn't have this functionality.

Fortunately, it comes with a Python console :-)

The missing files export was fairly easy, after some digging around and poking at the Python objects:

Try as I might, I was completely unable to obtain similar data for the import errors. After looking at the C code, I was able to determine that though the import errors were treated generally as a media source, due to their nature (not being able to provide the actual media itself), the related meta data was handled differently. Yet I wasn't able to decipher how, exactly.

So, I hopped on their mail list and asked for help :-) After a few quick exchanges, I was pointed in the right direction by one of the developers, who said that I needed to make use of the db object and some constants. After a quick test, this advice resulted in the following:


Note that the shell and rhythmdb objects are exposed by Rhythmbox in Python console sessions.

I now have a complete list of files that either need some file name updates or need to be burned to CD in iTunes and ripped to OGG.

So far, I've been pretty pleased with Rhythmbox. Thanks to their use of Python, I find I'm now becoming somewhat of a fan :-)