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David Kadavy: Hi! This is David Kadavy with Kadavy.net and today I am going to show you
how to transfer your iTunes library from one computer to another, without losing your song
ratings or your play counts. These can be very valuable when it comes to actually navigating
your music on the computer. There's a number of ways to actually get the physical files
to a new computer, but retaining play counts and song ratings requires a little bit of
hacking.
First, we're on our old computer. We are going to to go to our iTunes Menu, File > Library
> Export Library. This is going to create an XML file. I am just going to export this
to my desktop and this is going to have all this information in there about my play counts
and my song ratings. Now you're going to want to transfer the actual files over to the new
computer. There's a number of different ways to do this. Probably the best way is with
an external hard drive.
I am not personally going to go through all the details of that right now, but to find
out where your music is in your old computer, just go to your iTunes library, right-click
on a song, go "Show in Finder" or if you're on a Windows machine it will say something
else obviously, and you'll see where your files are.
Go back through the directory structure a little bit, and then you'll see the root folder
that holds all of your iTunes media. So this folder right here that says "iTunes Media,"
is a folder that I would want to transfer to my new computer, and I'll meet you over
there in a second.
OK, here I am over on my new computer. It looks oddly similar, doesn't it? Anyway, I've
got an empty iTunes library. I've got my XML file, library.xml over here, and I have got
my iTunes media file here on my Desktop. The first thing I want to do is going to iTunes
> Preferences > Advanced. Make sure this copy files to "iTunes Media" folder, when adding
the library, is selected. It is, that is good.
Now, this "iTunes media" folder has a space in the name of it, that's just going to complicate
things. Let's just change the name to just "iTunesmusic," with no space. Now, we're going
to open up the library.xml file. Look in here, you're going to see, this says, "Music folder,"
string file. This is the file path of where the music folder was on my old computer.
Now, if you're doing this, you're probably doing this from a Windows to a Mac, so it
probably says "C:\". Watch out for those back slashes, when we change this file path. What
we're going to do is define the file path of our new music folder. I'm going to right
click and say, "Get info." You can see the user is guest desktop, and then of course,
it's iTunes music.
What we're going to do is do a find change and, if you're going to a Mac, make sure you
remember this "file://". We're going to do a find change. We're going to find everything
that says this, and we're going to copy it. Go to edit, find, find, and paste that in
there. That's command V, open Apple V, replace with, now we're going to type in our new file
path.
"File://Users/", with capitalized, "Guest/", capitalized, which you probably have a different
user name. "Desktop/", capitalized, and another forward slash, "iTunesmusic/", and then one
final forward slash. We're going to do replace all. That is going to change, automagically,
everything in our whole library.xml that says that. Now, we're going to save that library.xml
file.
All right, now I'm going to actually import this library, using this XML file. I go to
File > Library > Import playlist. Find my library.xml file. Wait a little and it will
automatically import my library. Now, while I'm waiting for that, I'll tell you that you
can also find written instructions on this at Kadavy.net, on my post "Transfer your iTunes
library from one computer to another.: If you wanted to find this, you could just search
for "Transfer iTunes Kadavy." Also, I have the link in the sidebar.
It's finally done transferring. You can see now that I've got all my song ratings on here.
I started with a dummy library, I would have play counts on there. If you're wondering
why I have so many ones and twos in my libraries, it's because I organize it using a mood based
iTunes rating system. You can also find that on Kadavy.net, by searching for "Mood based
Kadavy," or I have the link in the sidebar for that.
Anyway, I hope this helps you transfer your iTunes library from one computer to another.
You can save all your song ratings, your play counts, and even your play lists, as well.
This has been David Kadavy with Kadavy.net.