Most versions of iTunes for Macintosh and Windows have some sort of ‘Export’ function, allowing you to export a list of songs into several formats, including plain text, Unicode and XML. Although these formats may be fine for importing into databases, they are rather clumsy to deal with if you just want a simple reference list of your songs.

Fortunately, there is a really easy way to create a listing of all your songs (or a part thereof, if you wish), either to print out, or to create a neat and orderly PDF reference.

In iTunes (FREE download), there is a command that allows you to create a formatted list of the songs or albums in your iTunes library. To begin, make sure you have selected ALL of your music by clicking ‘Music’ in the left navigation pane. Also, make sure don’t have any search terms enabled by clicking on the ‘x’ in the search field at the upper right corner. Now, you should have all your songs available for creation of your listing; you can look at the bottom of the iTunes window to see just how many songs are in your library.

With ‘Music’ selected in the left pane, and no searches active, select ‘Print’ from the File menu (or press command-P). Feel free to explore the various options in this dialog box: With the Song Listing option, you can choose to print the list according to song title, by the date last played or by the one- to five-star rating that iTunes lets you assign to songs in your library; You can also print jewel case inserts to your liking. For our purpose, however, we will be printing a list sorted by albums; so, select ‘Album listing’ from the print options. From the drop-down menu, select ‘Songs by album’. This format also displays album-cover artwork you have imported into iTunes.

Click ‘OK’ (or ‘Print’, if you are using a Mac) to print the list, which will fit on standard 8.5-by-11-inch paper. You can change the orientation of the paper by clicking on the Page Setup button in the Print box. But, Wait!! If you’re like most folks, you have WAY too many songs to print out on actual paper — and that would be such a waste. So, why not create a PDF instead? It’s much more convenient; and, It’s even text searchable within Acrobat!

Instead of clicking the next ‘Print’ button, click the ‘PDF’ drop-down button and select ‘Save as PDF…’. Then give your PDF a name, choose where you want it saved, and click ‘Save’. There you have it — a nicely formatted PDF with a listing of all your songs sorted by Artist/Album, complete with album artwork. Besides having all your songs listed in an organized manner, viewing the PDF also allows you to quickly see missing meta tags, wrong album artwork, misspellings, etc.

The next time someone asks what songs you have in your iTunes library, just show them the PDF you created. Be warned though — This PDF file can be quite large if you have gobs of songs in your library. The one that I made for my library (12,707 songs) ended up being 358 MB! And, .zip compression only reduced the size by 8 MB! So if you want to make it available to others, you’ll need to burn it on CD, post it to FTP or your iDisk, or have your friend bring along her thumb drive or other storage medium. (Note: if you have a full version of Acrobat, you can use the ‘Reduce File Size’ option in the File menu to cut the file size down considerably — like to 17 MB in my case.)

Just in case you’re wondering, HERE’S what I have in MY library. (16.2 MB)