Here’s the situation: you have iTunes set up on one computer with all your MP3s, playlists, purchased music, etc., and now you’d like to move said collection of music to a second computer – it’s really easy to do this… for some reason people kinda freak out about it on the net, but I’m gonna show you an easy way to do it… The key is setting up iTunes right in the first place.
- Preferences/Advanced: make sure the “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” items are both checked. Really, this will make your life so much easier in many regards. If this isn’t how your library was set up, you can change them now. You might have to go under Advanced/Consolidate Library to move everything.
- Have both computers set up on your network, or have a portable drive you can move from one to the other.
- Close down iTunes on both machines
- On the source machine, locate the iTunes folder (PC: typically it’s under My Documents/My Music/). Copy the following files/folders to their same place on the destination machine:
- iTunes Library (Mac), or iTunes Library.itl (PC)
- iTunes Music Library.xml
- iTunes Music (entire folder – this is where all your MP3s live)
- After everything copies (could be hours for a large library across a home network), start up iTunes on the destination machine. iTunes will take a minute or two to rebuild the library. Once it’s done, all your files, playlists, ratings, last-played, etc. will be there. When you click on a file that downloaded through the store, you’ll have to log-in and authorize your machine – and that’s it. You’re done.
A sample use – I use my Windows XP machine as my primary machine, it’s what I sync my iPod to etc., but I don’t always leave it because it’s loud. But I do leave my Mac Mini on all the time, so I keep a copy of my library on the Mac – that way I can listen to tunes whenever (it’s hooked up to the stereo). When I add songs to the PC, then I’ll just copy over those folders and the XML and .itl files again… it’s pretty easy, and then you have a backup of everything too.