iPod and iTunes Hacks

Control iTunes with Perl

Use the Mac::iTunes Perl module to control iTunes from scripts and from other machines

When I started to work with iTunes AppleScripts, I wanted them to be as easy to write as Perl scripts, even though they were not. After a while, I decided to fix that by writing a Perl module to handle the AppleScript portions of iTunes. I already had a MacOSX::iTunes Perl module that I used to parse the binary format of the iTunes Music Library.xml file. I needed to add AppleScript support to it.

On the suggestion of Chris Nandor, the caretaker of MacPerl and author of Mac::Carbon, I changed the name of my distribution to Mac::iTunes and added the Mac::iTunes::AppleScript module, which wrapped common AppleScripts in Perl functions. The meat of the module was the _osascript routine, which creates an AppleScript string and calls osascript:

sub _osascript
        {
        my $script = shift;

        require IPC::Open2;

        my( $read, $write );
        my $pid = IPC::Open2::open2( $read, $write, 'osascript' );

        print $write qq(tell application "iTunes"\n), $script,
						qq(\nend tell\n);
        close $write;

        my $data = do { local $/; <$read> };

        return $data;
        }

The Mac::iTunes::AppleScript module works much like the osascript command-line tool. Indeed, the first version simply created a script string (called osascript) with that script and captured the output, if any, for parsing. About the same time I finished the first version, Nathan Torkington needed Perl access to AppleScript and convinced Dan Sugalski to write Mac:: ...