[Pythonmac-SIG] Accessing the iTunes database directly? David Stokes wrote:
> Can the iTunes library database be accessed directly via Python? No. Your only options are the Apple event interface and the read-only XML file in your iTunes library. > What I want to do are some fairly basic manipulations of the data but using > the scripting API (from both appscript and AppleScript) was ridiculously > slow; operations that took seconds in comparable manipulations of a SQLite > database of a similar size took multiple hours. Did you read the 'About application scripting' and 'Performance issues' chapters in the appscript manual? Remember, Apple events = RPC + queries, not OOP. Remotely iterating over large data sets will absolutely kill your script performance-wise. While certain tasks can only be done via iteration and lots of small simple commands, e.g. setting the name of every track in a 50,000-track library, plenty of others can be reduced to just one or two commands by using more sophisticated queries, e.g.: tracks_ref = iTunes.tracks info = zip(tracks_ref.name.get(), tracks_ref.album.get()) # 2 commands not: info = [(track.name.get(), track.album.get() for track in iTunes.tracks.get()] # 2*N+1 commands If you're already familiar with how relational DB queries operate, it's not so different (as that is where the original AppleScript engineers nicked half their ideas from). HTH has -- Learn AppleScript, 3rd edition, Sanderson & Rosenthal: http://apress.com/book/view/9781430223610 Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC: http://appscript.sourceforge.net _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/Pythonmac-SIG
