A friend of mine wanted to copy some files from an iTunes playlist to an external drive, but iTunes wouldn't allow her to simply let these files being dragged to the intended destination folder in Finder . She asked me what she could do about it.

I thought about it for a minute, knowing that it wouldn't work with iTunes alone - but I realized that it's probably simple to code a solution. Even better than having a separate standalone application for it, I figured I could write a new FUSE file system - making use of the excellent MacFUSE OSXFUSE macFUSE project!

Enter iTunesFS, a FUSEOFS based file system for your Mac, which makes all your iTunes playlists available in Finder! And not only that… as you can see in the screenshot below, version 1.1 adds support for iPods in the very same manner!

Now you can easily copy content of your iTunes library and your iPods in Finder or the Terminal - ideal for, err, backing up specific content. Whatever.

As noted by Peter da Silva, the above statement isn't really true for current (7.x) iTunes versions. In fact, these versions allow you to drag files from playlists to mounted filesystems, effectively making them copyable via drag and drop. However, this still isn't true for mounted iPods within iTunes. Also, the playlist ordering won't be preserved by doing so, thus using iTunesFS still has quite a lot of advantages.