[reemas]

im new to mac. i just oredred a powerbook. one of the first things i want to do is transfer all my existing mp3's (8 gigs) in the fastest way to my powerbook from my dell pc. how can i do this fast and easily?
on the same note, any tips for transferring a few gigs of photos?

thanks!

[Spheric Harlot]

If your Dell has Firewire, this is the easiest solution:

Reboot your Powerbook into Firewire Target Disk Mode by holding down the "T" key on startup. This turns the 'book into a Firewire hard drive.

Hook it up to the Dell and copy your music to

/Users/yourusername/Music/iTunes

Edit: probably a good idea to fix disk permissions on the Powerbook using the Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities) after you're done.

-s*

[toshigen]

I don't think that would work with a PC, since PC's can't read Mac formatted disks/hard drives. If anything, you'd get some message about the hard drive being unreadable and it would ask you if you wanted to format it.

My suggestion would be to set up both computers on a home network. Here's a guide that may help:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=54704

If you don't have a network hub, you can connect the computers together with an ethernet crossover cable (which you can buy at the local CompUSA).

[f1000]

I agree with toshigen: transferring your MP3's through a network is the way to go.

By the way, I don't think you'll need a crossover cable, since all current Macs have autosensing Ethernet ports (stomp on me if I'm wrong).

[tooki]

For just a couple of gigabytes, I'd burn it all to CD or DVD. That way, you also have a backup.

tooki

[amazing]

Tooki's right, you're eventually going to want to have a backup of all the mp3 music, so you might as well burn them right away if your PC has a burner. If it doesn't then you should eventually burn them from the PB. If you don't have a backup of your music, you're eventually going to lose hours of work if something ever crashes.

There's a bigger decision, though. Unless you've got a portable mp3 player, you may actually want to redigitize your music in aac format, because the file size is smaller. In other words, you can custom digitize in a higher aac format and still have comparable file sizes to lower fidelity mp3 formats. For example, I've got some music that I sometimes run through a board, and I digitized those at 320 mp3 format--if I did it over again, I'd do it in a "fatter" aac format because I'd be saving HD space...and I don't have a portable mp3 player.