A Few Good Memes

For anyone Googling for Total Recorder Pro, iTunes, and Perl on Windows, I’ve created tr2itunes.pl that takes a TR job name, a “show name” (i.e. whatever you want to call your recording), a duration, a path to save to, and an extension for the file (i.e. mp3) and launches a TR job, records it to a file name based on the show name and date, gives it and ID3v2 tag with the show name, and puts it in iTunes in a playlist with the name of the job as the playlist.

This basically gives you a way to schedule any web broadcast directly into your iPod.

To use Windows’ Scheduled Task functionality with this (I had trouble using Cygwin cron because it runs as a different user by default and can’t do OLE automation to iTunes), just create a task with something like the following:

“c:\Program Files\cygwin\bin\perl5.8.2.exe” “c:\Documents and Settings\Jase\My Documents\bin\tr2itunes.pl” “WBAA AM” “Acoustic Blend” “01:04:00″ “c:\Documents and Settings\Jase\My Documents\My Music\WBAA” “mp3″

This assumes your TotalRecorder.exe is in its standard install location and that you have Perl’s Win32::OLE, File::Basename, and MP3::Tag.

Please feel free to use this under the GPL

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use Win32::OLE;
use File::Basename;
use MP3::Tag;

my $scriptName = basename($0);
my $job = $ARGV[0];
my $show = $ARGV[1];
my $duration = $ARGV[2];
my $path = $ARGV[3];
my $extension = $ARGV[4];

die “usage: $scriptName \n” unless $job && $show && $duration && $path && $extension;

my ($second, $minute, $hour, $day, $month, $year, $weekday, $dayOfYear, $isDST) = localtime time;
$month += 1;
$year += 1900;
my $date = sprintf(”%02d-%02d-%04d %02d.%02d.%02d”, $month, $day, $year, $hour, $minute, $second);
my $file = “$path$show-$date.$extension”;

print “Recording $show from job “$job” to $file\n”;
system(”/c/Program\ Files/HighCriteria/TotalRecorder/TotalRecorder.exe “$file” /Time:$duration /Job:”$job”");

print “Tagging $file\n”;
my $mp3File = MP3::Tag->new($file);
$mp3File->new_tag(”ID3v2″);
$mp3File->{ID3v2}->add_frame(”TIT2″,”$show - $month/$day/$year”);
$mp3File->{ID3v2}->write_tag;

print “Adding $file to iTunes\n”;
my $iTunesApp = new Win32::OLE(’iTunes.Application’);
$iTunesApp->LibraryPlaylist->AddFile($file);
my $playlist = $iTunesApp->LibrarySource->Playlists->ItemByName($job);
$playlist = $iTunesApp->CreatePlaylist($job) unless $playlist;
$playlist->AddFile($file);
$iTunesApp->UpdateIpod();