Be Excellent To Each Other

I've ordered the gubbins to build a new PC, and I'll be starting from scratch hard drive wise. My iTunes music is currently somewhere around the 50GB mark and I'd like to keep it, and it's all stored in the "My Music" folder in My Documents. iTunes pulls the mp3s from there and displays them in a nicely organised list with artwork and everything. If I basically copy my My Music folder over to my new system, install iTunes and add the My Music folder to iTunes, will it pick everything up as it was, or will I have to fuck about renaming certain things and reorganising everything again?

A-ha! I just did this. Copy the music files to your new system, let iTunes find it, but then you must add the 'Music Library' XML file.

There are many over-long and esoteric methods online of sorting it. Corrupting ITL files, creating empty music libraries ets. No!

Just do File > Libary > Import playlist... and look in the folder your iTunes points to. Music Library.xml should ideally be in there. Click on it.

Sit back and wait. Mine took a while to import (and organise!), but my iTunes is >500gb. Yours shouldn't take too long.

[edit] But the above depends how 'organised' you want it. Playlists and stuff, right? Cool. Oh, and you'll probably have to re-find some artwork.

If you've ticked "let iTunes manage my music" then in my experience (I've done this half a dozen times) you don't need to do anything at all. Install the new one. Make a user with the same name. Copy all of c:\users\username from one machine to another. Install iTunes. Load it and your library shoul be there.

Yep, this worked perfectly for me, btw.

Or pre-Vista, C:\Documents and Settings\username.

Thanks guys! This was the thing I was most worried about.

edit: Also, Throughsilver - 500GB? What the fuck?!

You really want to copy ntuser.dat from one machine to another?

Yeah yeah. Alright. What I do is run a synctoy sync operation for c:\users\<whoever> over to an external disk, then repeat the procedure on the new machine the other way. That's never broken for me because Windows is running and holding a lock on ntuser.dat, so it's never overwritten. It's a bit fly-by-night but it works.

Or, rather than just copying the whole of your user folder, just copy the music folder from the previous user folder to the new one. As long as iTunes is correctly set up and using your previous Music Library.xml gubbins and all your music is in the same place it was before, iTunes will work.

Or what Zio said. I like copying all the data though. Loads of stuff comes over, like Firefox login cookies.

That's exactly what I did, thinking about it.

Well, I thought that too, but nothing has ever broken from doing this, that I've noticed anyway. Mind you I just assume Windows is going to break and flake out on me, so maybe I've just never noticed.

~22,000 tracks, mostly ripped to Apple Lossless files. ^_^

Aha! Lossless! Having said that, I have 8224 songs on my iPod at the moment, and I thought that was a lot!

Remember to deauthorise the outgoing machine before decommissioning it, if you tie it to an Apple ID.

Oh, good call! I have a couple of hundred properly bought and purchased tunes, so that's definitely worthwhile.

I always forget to do this. I've now got three computers authorised out of five. How do I deauthorise them without actually being on the machines themselves?

List time I told my PC to count my songs, I got fed up waiting for an answer. I think I've got somewhere in the region of 3TB

The fuck?!

Fuck knows, I only authorised my first one a couple of weeks back.

I would've thought you could ring Apple and say "Please deauthorise all computers against my account, I'll reauth the one that still exists after that."

But then again, I have a shred of decency about me, Apple may just tell you to get bent.

You can keep adding more authorised computers until you hit five. When you come to add the sixth, you then get a special button that deauths all five in one go, but you are only allowed to use that button once a year (fucking stupid rules). You can ring Apple and ask nicely.

It's worth doing the deauth thing, but not critical. I was very lazy about it I've it took years before I hit the five machine limit (my Macbook was the sixth).

For DJing and stuff, man. For a long while (four years? Five?) we had every single and album that entered the top 40.

Oh yeah, I'd forgot you do a bit of the owld DJing and that!

I load all of mine into iTunes, so I have easy access to stats-a-go-go.

Mine's running at 51,340 tracks at 300gb. I'm comfortable in the knowledge that if I require anything lossier, the physical discs are next door on a shelf.

How do I find my Music Library XML? It's not in my music folder...

I seem to have "exported" a Library.xml file. So I've got that - then what do I do - import it on my new computer and hope it realises I've moved the music folder to a music folder on Windows 7?

I think I've worked it out, nevermind!

Lossier? Or less lossy?

And yeah, I ripped the stuff because I didn't really want to faff about with CDs any more, for numerous reasons. So when it's ripped, I stick it in storage. Or give it to someone. And I want things less lossy on a constant basis.