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I had another session with Itunes. A client wanted to move the library from one machine to another in their home office. All of the usual fixes just didn’t work, so I will add below my chosen method on moving an iTunes library, on a PC.
(1)On the current iTunes machine, Go to “Edit>Preferences>Advanced>General”. You will see a path listed as “iTunes Music Folder Location” showing “My Documents etc.” I suggest you change this to “C:\iTunes_Music\”, Click OK and close the Properties view. This hasn’t changed anything yet, Now click on “Advanced>Consolidate Library.” This will now move all of the music to the new location you previously entered. This may take some time.
Once complete, copy that folder across to the new machine KEEPING the folder path identical to the one you used on the first machine at step(1).
Once complete, Browse to the “My Music/iTunes” folder and copy the the documents “iTunes Library.itl” and “iTunes Music Library.xml” plus the “Album Artwork” folders across to the new machine, storing these files in the appropriate “My Music/iTunes” folder.
Once the music is copied over, and you have copied the two files plus Album Artwork, you should start iTunes. Register with the iTunes Store and Authorise your computer. After doing all of this, close iTunes and re-open it. Everything should work just fine on the new machine.
Let me know how you get on please!
I revisited the previous data backup and recovery job today. The data was recovered by PC world and copied to an external USB drive before I got there. PC World appears to have missed a few important folders and data spaces, but since we had the original drive (and there was nothing wrong with it) I set it up inside my USB/CAT5 caddy. Finding the data on the drive was no problem, allowing me to complete the transfer.
iTunes is annoying. Very annoying. iTunes simply would not recognise the library data even though everything was copied over correctly. I ended up creating a fake library location on the new machine to correspond with the location used by the old PC. I then managed to get iTunes to detect and import this data (after authorising everything!) At this point iTunes was happy, but I wasn’t. The data was in the wrong place. Moving the data folder in iTunes and Consolidating the data moved the files where I wanted them. Now to clean up all of the crap required to keep iTunes happy. Why do they make this so difficult? There is no need to do all of this work. Just create a folder structure and work within it please, don’t route all the XML data with hard paths, that’s just annoying.
Anyway, with iTunes kicked and accepting its fate, on to completing the data backup systems. Shared folders were built, allowing the machines to sync to each other. The client is happy using Microsoft Backup so we run this and set it off. Everything was working nicely on both machines.
Nice, except for the iTunes crap.
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