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brian_d_foy (44)

brian_d_foy
  brian.d.foy@gmail.com
http://www.pair.com/~comdog/

Journal of brian_d_foy (44)

Monday June 06, 2005
07:44 AM

Mac::iTunes::Library::Parse is worse than broken

[ #25056 ]

While I was on my big camping trip Apple changed the format of the iTunes binary library file. I finally got some time to look at it this weekend (it helps that someone wants to pay me to do this).

I thought it might be a simple fix: find out a few points of difference and code around them. No big whoop. I've done that with previous versions.

But, looking at the files, I don't see anything I recognize. Well, I know what the first 16 bytes are, but after that there isn't a human readable string. It's compressed or encrypted or something.

But, luckily, I'm off to WWDC and there is someone there who may be able to help. Well, he has the knowledge, so I'm hoping he isn't bound by an NDA, a hatred of Perl, or a revulsion to money.


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Mac::iTunes::Library::Parse is worse than broken 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Is it a plist file? Apple now uses binary formats for plist files. I don't know how to get at the data programatically, but it's the same data, and Property List Editor (in /Developer/ somewhere) can read it.
    • No, it isn't a plist file, it appears to be encoded somehow, I know apple has used base 64, but this doesn't appear to be base 64 encoded, I could be wrong... I don't have a good resource on what typical encodings look like so I can't really tell.
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