A couple of years ago, I was part of a team that attempted to build a Rube Goldberg-style breakfast-making machine, part of the Take On the Machine hackerspace challenge. I posted the two Artisan’s Asylum segments, but the site that originally hosted the videos appears to have dropped them. Today, I rediscovered the videos on YouTube!
See the videos now!
The situation: I wanted to keep the music collection on my phone fresh. I use iTunes since I have a Mac and an iPad, but my phone is Android-based. This wouldn’t be a problem if my phone had enough storage for my entire library — I’d just copy everything and be done with it — but I have many times more music than my phone has space. iTunes will do some stuff to randomize the subset of music on an iOS device to fill available space, but there’s no simple bridge to Android.
The solution: MusicMover. I put together a moderately simple Python script that reads the iTunes library XML and copies tracks (to a specific total size or minimum free space) to my phone when I mount it as a USB drive. It doesn’t just copy, though: it replaces (by default) a third of the music already on the phone with fresh tracks.
It’s a fairly bare-bones, but it gets the job done. As it stands, it’s a command-line utility, with an optional Tk progress bar display. Since it may be of use to others, at least as a starting point for their own projects, I’ve put it on GitHub. I’d like to see what other people can do with it.