Printing List of Artists then Albums

Question

Some time ago, I was able to obtain a nice list from iTunes of artists, followed by their albums.   I am using iTunes 11 under OS 10.6.8, and I suspect this was an earlier version of iTunes.  The format was:
Artist Name
     Album 1
     Album 2
     Album 3
Next Artist Name
     Album 1
     Album 2
No songs.  No time length.  Nothing else.
This gave me a nice compact listing.
When I go to File/Print and select "Album List", then "List of Albums", I get way more information than I need, plus each artist is repeated over and over again, with lots of room between each line.   The result is far too large an output.
I suspect I exported something before, perhaps to Word or Excel.  But the Export option appears to have been removed from iTunes 11.
Anyone have any ideas how to get what I am looking for?

Answer 1

As I see it you have a few possible options…
See if dougscripts can help http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=makeatextlist (there probably are other scripts on there that may help - search for 'export' on the site - some others are mentioned at Parsing iTunes XML).
Parse the .xml into the fields you desire (probably via a Python script or similar). I suspect there will be something around if you are willing to search & try running them. This should give the best output but may take some work.
Parse the output of a directory listing (assuming iTunes manages the location of the media), the next commands will create a list based on the folder structure of the iTunes Library - it does not list compilations correctly, you will need to handle them separately. This may not be what you want, especially if you want a subset of the library.
cd  ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/Music
find . -type d -maxdepth 1 -exec find {} -type d -mindepth 1 \; | sed -e 's|./||' -e 's|/|    |'
NOTE: You may need to provide a different path to the music folder, mine has been migrated over many years & may not be the same as yours (drag & drop to get the Terminal to auto fill correcting any spaces in the path).
It outputs like …
A Tribe Called Quest    The Anthology
Add N to (X)    Add Insult to Injury
Add N to (X)    Avant Hard
In short it finds folders one level deep, then inside those find the next folder names and parse out the leading './' and convert the next slash to 4 spaces.
You may want to change the spaces to commas so you can import to a spreadsheet, however that will need careful handling when Albums or Artists contain commas.
This next one is cleaner, again run it from inside the music folder
cd  ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/Music
ls */ | sed -e  '/^$/d' -e 's/\(.*[^/\:]\)$/     \1/'   -e 's|\/\:||'
It looks more like your original aim
Orbital
     Blue Album
     In Sides
     Orbital II
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
     Peel Sessions 1979-1983
Hope that's some food for thought.