Macworld Forums: Am I doing this right? Putting my old iTunes library on my new Mac . . . - Macworld Forums

Bought a MBP a few months ago and have been putting off adding my iTunes library to it for a while, since it works fine on my older iMac G4, which is connected to a beter sound system. But I'll be moving soon, so I need to get it all on the MBP, plus, I just bought the new iPod, which requires 10.4.9, and my G4 has only 10.3. So . . . it was time to get it done.



Basically . . . I'm copying userfolder/music/itunes to my external hard drive, with the 'itunes' folder just getting copied. But on my new machine, there is also userfolder/music/itunes . . . with 5 things (3 folders) already inside. How should I copy them to my machine? I was going to use the "itunes" folder from the old machine and overwritethe local machine's new itunes folder. But I'm worried about doing that because inside my new machine's "itunes" folder are the 5 items that are part of the new OS?

If I just go one level deeper, to the itunes music folder, I get all the artists folders ad songs, etc., but all the "temp files" would have to be manually added.



What should I do? Thanks for any guidance.



-Jason

An easy way would be to use migration assistant, or create an iTunes backup and put it into iTunes, or for a super easy way, to enable network sharing on the PB's iTunes library in iTunes>>Preferences, and then the sharing pane. Then open iTunes on the MBP and select all the files and drag them over to your library.

I guess I could activate network sharing, but does this drag my library only or the actually audio files?

Another point is, I basically got it to work, but am redoing this because my iPod was loading super slow. I only was able to transfer 4 gigs in about 3 hours. So I thought I must be doing something wrong, and am now back to step one.

jasonscott71 said:

That part right there sounds a bit like a USB 1.0 based G4. Also, I'm guessing that your external harddrive is Firewire based... is this correct? If both of these assumptions are correct, then you're absolutely going to be better off once you can sync the iPod with your new MBP; believe it or not, it'll take significantly less time to copy the entire library to the external drive, then to the MBP's harddrive, and then to the iPod then it will to copy the library directly to the iPod over a USB 1.0 connection.

Regarding your original question: I'm not sure what you mean by "temp" files within the iTunes folder... but unless the play count and playlists are tremendously important to you, it might be easier to just drag the iTunes folder from your external harddrive directly onto the iTunes application window. Assuming that you have "Keep iTunes Music Folder organized" checked in Preferences:Advanced:General, this will allow iTunes to automatically copy all of the files into their correct place within the MBPs existing iTunes folder, without losing those files that you said are already on the MBP.