Okay, you asked for it. Here's a song entry from iTunes on my Mac:

Quote:
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>3579</integer>
<key>Name</key><string>Pennies from Heaven</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Stéphane Grappelli</string>
<key>Album</key><string>Verve Jazz Masters 11</string>
<key>Genre</key><string>Jazz</string>
<key>Kind</key><string>MPEG audio file</string>
<key>Size</key><integer>5172996</integer>
<key>Total Time</key><integer>229067</integer>
<key>Track Number</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Year</key><integer>1966</integer>
<key>Date Modified</key><date>2003-09-17T14:52:25Z</date>
<key>Date Added</key><date>2002-07-14T20:19:06Z</date>
<key>Bit Rate</key><integer>180</integer>
<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>
<key>Comments</key><string>Track 1</string>
<key>Track Type</key><string>File</string>
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Volumes/BulkStuff/ dwallach/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/Ste%CC%81phane%20Grappelli/ Verve%20Jazz%20Masters%2011/01%20Pennies%20from%20Heaven.mp3</string>
<key>File Folder Count</key><integer>4</integer>
<key>Library Folder Count</key><integer>1</integer>
</dict>


Now, here's the "same" entry from my PC:

Quote:
<dict>
<key>Track ID</key><integer>2489</integer>
<key>Name</key><string>Pennies from Heaven</string>
<key>Artist</key><string>Stéphane Grappelli</string>
<key>Album</key><string>Verve Jazz Masters 11</string>
<key>Genre</key><string>Jazz</string>
<key>Kind</key><string>MPEG audio file</string>
<key>Size</key><integer>5172996</integer>
<key>Total Time</key><integer>229067</integer>
<key>Track Number</key><integer>1</integer>
<key>Year</key><integer>1966</integer>
<key>Date Modified</key><date>2003-09-17T14:52:25Z</date>
<key>Date Added</key><date>2005-01-30T03:00:25Z</date>
<key>Bit Rate</key><integer>180</integer>
<key>Sample Rate</key><integer>44100</integer>
<key>Comments</key><string>Track 1</string>
<key>Track Type</key><string>File</string>
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Z:/ Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/St%C3%A9phane%20Grappelli/ Verve%20Jazz%20Masters%2011/01%20Pennies%20from%20Heaven.mp3/</string>
<key>File Folder Count</key><integer>-1</integer>
<key>Library Folder Count</key><integer>-1</integer>
</dict>



I added spaces so the location lines would wrap in nice places, otherwise, this is straight out of the XML. You can see that they've got the right thing in the artist tag, but they seem to be encoding it for the file name. That encoding seems to only be for the XML version of the file name. The actual filename, on the real disk, has the accent decoded ('ls' on the file will show the accent). Despite all this bizzareness, the file will play just fine on either machine. (Z: is mounted to my home directory on the Mac.) The only challenge is getting it stored locally instead of remotely.

I'm running the damn tar again. Last time, it freaked out when the file it had written got over 4GB in size. This time, writing to stdout, it seems to be working. That should capture everything except for about 30 files (like the above example) with messed up accent characters. I'll deal with those by hand for now, but if anybody has any ideas how to automate this, I'd love to hear it. One possibly attractive idea would be to write a script on the Mac to simplify the filenames. Just nuke all the accents and update the XML database. The accents will still be there in the XML database and the ID3 tags. If I also hacked down long file names, I'd probably be able to get the "consolidate" thing to actually work. *sigh*