[kcm3]

The title summarizes it best, really. I have all of my music on my iMac, and I'd like to copy it over to my Thinkpad. I don't want to do sharing/streaming, because I take the Thinkpad to work, travel with it, etc.

I tried just mounting my drive from windows and copying the foler over the network. This doesn't work out so well, because Win2K chokes all over any folder that ends with a "." -- given the way iTunes has structured by library, this is kind of a hassle. R.E.M., N.W.A., a fair share of others cause the network copy to stop altogether.

Obviously I could manually rename "problem" folders, but that's kind of a hassle, since I'd like to sync the folders regularly, to keep the collections in sync, and I don't want to always have to check for this.

Anyone have a more elegant idea?

[waffffffle]

change R.E.M to REM within iTunes itself (you can do a batch change) and it will change the folder name. Then transfer.

[waffffffle]

change R.E.M to REM within iTunes itself (you can do a batch change) and it will change the folder name. Then transfer.

[waffffffle]

change R.E.M to REM within iTunes itself (you can do a batch change) and it will change the folder name. Then transfer.

[brinj]

Originally posted by kcm3:
The title summarizes it best, really. I have all of my music on my iMac, and I'd like to copy it over to my Thinkpad. I don't want to do sharing/streaming, because I take the Thinkpad to work, travel with it, etc.

I tried just mounting my drive from windows and copying the foler over the network. This doesn't work out so well, because Win2K chokes all over any folder that ends with a "." -- given the way iTunes has structured by library, this is kind of a hassle. R.E.M., N.W.A., a fair share of others cause the network copy to stop altogether.

Obviously I could manually rename "problem" folders, but that's kind of a hassle, since I'd like to sync the folders regularly, to keep the collections in sync, and I don't want to always have to check for this.

Anyone have a more elegant idea?

as above tell itunes to locate all the artist names with R.E.M (or whatever) in them. Then select all and press"command i" you'll get a dialogue that asks you if you want to edit them all. say yes and then take the periods out of the names. done quick and easy.

Then, go to the file menu and choose "exprort library" .
Network the two computers.
Open itunes on the windows machine. Go to the file menu and choose import…
then navigate to the library file and choose it.
This should import all the library and its associated files to your new itunes. Again, easy.
Later on, when your ready to add more new songs. you only need to network, choose add to library, navigate to and choose the itunes music folder on the other computer and it will automatically add all the new tunes

[kcm3]

Easy, except that I always have to change the artist/album names. It's not optimal aesthetically, and I always have to remember to change that when I get a new CD or download a song.

I've been trying to figure out a way to get samba to handle this for me automatically, but it seems like all of the mangling and stripping rules only apply to filenames (not folders), which doesn't help me.

Thanks for your suggestions, it looks like the best I can do for now.

I wonder how the iTMS handles this on windows? The files offered for download have correct tags, with trailing dots. But I don't think the OS will let you create a folder with a trailing dot, and you certainly can't manipulate files in it afterwards...

[kcm3]

Just to follow up in case anyone else is dealing with this. What I ended up doing was mounting my iPod as a drive over SMB, and copying all of my songs from the iPod over to the Thinkpad. (I don't have firewire on the Thinkpad, or a USB adapter for my iPod, so I couldn't just hook it up to the Thinkpad).

Anyway, the reason that this was a better solution for me is that the iPod doesn't organize the music into Artist/Album folders, like I have iTunes set up to do. That's better for me, since I would rather have correct-looking metadata than any organization under the covers. This way, iTunes for Windows still shows all of the correct Artist/Album names... yes, I realize that this whole fiasco proves me to be incredibly anal.