Moving from iTunes to Rhythmbox

Question

I am about to start moving my iTunes collection from my MacBook Pro to my Ubuntu PC and Rhythmbox.

I have a few questions before I begin,

1. Can I migrate over my playlists and song play counts?

2. I would like to re-rip my CDs into ALAC or AIFF formats to maintain metadata in the songs. Can Rhythmbox do this without upsetting playcounts etc. iTunes allows me to do this?

3. On the Mac/iTunes the songs ripped in ALAC or AIFF are recompressed automatically into 256 AAC files for my iPod Classic when it syncs. This keeps the higher def sounds on the computer and a more portable format on the iPod. I would like to continue doing this with Rhythmbox. Is it possible?

Answer 1

For the playlist:

Step 1: Export the iTunes playlist. Simply right click the playlist and pick “Export…”. Then, save it to a text file. Move this file with your music collection to your Linux box.

Step 2: Download the script (importpl.py, 1.5 KB) and modify the “win_path” and “lin_path” variables (lines 5 and 6) to reflect the proper paths. The script will take care of changing Windows’ backslashes to forward slashes.

Step 3: Run the script to convert the iTunes playlist to the Rhythmbox “.pls” format. Here’s an example usage of the Python script:

$ python importpl.py iTunesPlaylist.txt LinuxPlaylist.pls

Step 4: Import your playlist into Rhythmbox. Just go to Music > Playlist > Load From File…

For ripping in ALAC/AIFF format:

It looks like it can't be done. However, there are ways you can convert to your specified formats but Rhythmbox can't do it.

For the recompressing:

According to this user, Rhythmbox converts ALAC automatically to the (presumably) AAC format. Don't know the specifications of the format though

Answer 2

For the playlists and song play counts

A while ago I faced the same issue and wrote a script called migrate-itunes-to-rhythmbox. It will convert your playlists, play counts and ratings to Rhythmbox. You can migrate all playlists at once with just a single command. So you don't need to export each playlist one after another in iTunes and import them manually to Rhythmbox.