[butchfoote]

My daughter has all of her iTunes library on an external HD.

She is moving the HD to a new Mac computer.

How do we tell iTunes on the new computer to use her existing iTunes Library.

We tried going to "Advanced" Peferenences and setting the iTunes Music folder location to the one in the external HD. But nothing shows up in the Library.

What are we missing here?

This ought to be drop dead dumb to do.

[shrugs*]

I recently went through this..

From what I've learned, your first step is correct-- however our logic behind it is a little off. I thought the same as you, that specifying the directory would allow iTunes to access all of the music. Nope... just need to reimport it (click and drag the iTunes directory back into iTunes).

Keep in mind you may need to authenticate the system for any purchased music.

[Nivag]

this is what Apple says you should do - iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder

But all i did was copy my iTunes folder to another hard drive, delete the original, then create an alias back to my Music folder within my home folder. which is pretty much what you do above.

[selowitch]

All I do in this case is copy all the files in ~/Music/iTunes (and below) put them in the same directory on the new machine. Works great. No muss, no fuss. I'm not sure if my playlists are preserved that way, but in my case I don't really care since I don't use them often.

[bmd6491]

yup

[hart]

bumpety bump bump!!

OK, I've got my music from previous machine on a secondary internal drive. here's a previous discussion on the same subject misplaced in OSX forum:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/...machine+itunes

With itunes 7 has any of this changed? I want to get the right file in the right place to move my playlists from the old itunes since I have thousands of songs all organized. So what preference files, library files, etc have to get moved where with itunes 7?

Unfortunately, I went ahead and created a few playlists and bought music in the new machine already but it's not so many that I can't recreate it once I've got the old playlists and prefs moved.

I've been putting this off for ages.

-------------------edit
wait a sec, can I just point the library to the external drive and say "include this" without having to actually merge the new and old libraries on one drive as per this old post:

http://forums.macnn.com/82/applicati...itunes+library

help me, GHPorter, you're my only hope!

seems like there should be one "moving your itunes libraries, prefs, playlists, yadda yadda yadda" thread with all this info in one place

as ever, thanks for your continuing support in the ever-shifting world of computing.

[hart]

oh, come on guys, no itunes know-it-alls?

I guess I'm just going to have to wing it.

[Hi I'm Ben]

Okay here's what I do, although I'm not sure how far your level of technical understanding will carry you. Also this is only useful if you wish to keep all the playlists, ratings, playcounts intact. If you simply just wish to put the songs into iTunes you will not find this useful.

Before making the switch export the old ibrary from iTunes using File >Export Library


Now, bring that that file to the new computer.

Locate the folder with the old music in it. If you don't know where it is spotlight should be able to help you find it.

Drag ONE SONG from that library into iTunes.

Now, Export a copy of that new Library to your desktop and name it something different from the one you already saved.

With the newly exported log file, drag it into TextEdit using the dock icon as your point of contact. You'll see a lot of text but what you want to find is the path of the file name for your newly imported music here's what mine looks like. Using command+F (Find) should prove to be very useful.



Now copy just the first part of that pathname excluding any of the artists/album folders. It should look something like this.




Next, open up your first export of the Library you did from the other machine. Find a song pathname in it. Open up find and replace and switch that pathname to the new location. Do a Replace all. The replace with should be the NEW path for your music. depending on your music library size the replace process may appear to freeze up TextEdit for a moment, this is okay.

*For my example I used the same Library file because I only have one.


Once replaced hit save.

Go back into iTunes and find File > Import
Select the library which you just changed the pathnames for, this should be the original, and import it into iTunes. All your music will now populate your iTunes and you've done it!