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Any way of copying just the music portion of iTunes with all info?

I have a rather large amount of media in iTunes (i just had to upgrade to a 1TB HD for my media center, but can’t and don’t want to put anything other than the music on my PowerBook. Is there anyway I can transfer just the music to the PB WITHOUT losing all the tags and playlists i’ve created over the years?
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Kirk Aplin

Comments: 8 Responses to “Any way of copying just the music portion of iTunes with all info?”

    13 years ago

    So you want to leave video, audiobooks, apps and podcasts behind, and just copy the music. BUT -- you want to take the tags and playlists.
    Do some experimentation.
    What happens if you try copying a single audio file? Does it retain the tags? If not, then you are probably going to have to copy over more than just the files themselves.
    Do you have so many playlists that you can't just simply recreate them on the new Mac?
    How about this as an experiment: copy the data files and music files from your iTunes library folder to your new Mac. Then run iTunes and see what happens. It might just self-correct when it sees all of the videos and other things missing.

      Kirk Aplin
      13 years ago

      I copied data and music to PowerBook. Started iTunes with option and chose the copied folder as location of iTunes. iTunes started up and looked just like iTunes on my Mac but all the tracks had the '!' indicating the location of the track was unknown. (that's in excess of 9300 tracks). locating one will find several and restore all the info, but that's going to be an extensive task. Deleting a track from the library and re-adding it from the media is quicker (i can do a whole album at a time) but that loses some data - notably ratings and equalizer setting so that's not a solution either. Still looking.

      btw: I'm not sure I understand Howard's comment.

        13 years ago

        It sounds like you placed the iTunes library in some other location than your Music folder. Any reason for that? I wonder if the iTunes library was placed in Music, the same place (I assume) it was on your old Mac, then it would not have that problem.

          Kirk Aplin
          13 years ago

          I did put the iTunes library in "Music". It's still having trouble. For every track I locate manually, iTunes finds about 100.

    Kirk Aplin
    13 years ago

    I have dozens of playlists in a dozen categories. No, I really don't want to construct them again. What do you mean by "data files"?

      13 years ago

      Anything in your iTunes library folder that isn't media -- .itdb files, xml files, etc.

        Kirk Aplin
        13 years ago

        Okay, i'll give it a shot.

    Howard Brazee
    13 years ago

    When I got my Mac, I started up iTunes, burned 1 song from CD to start its library, then exited iTunes.

    Then I copied my iTunes folder from my Windows machine to the same folder on my Mac. When I started up on my new computer, my iTunes library worked just fine!

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