Learn Something New Every Day

Every day, people learn something new that adds some kind of value to their lives. I am going to try to post at one thing that I learn every day. I am a law school graduate, used to do some IT work, and just generally get out and around, so this shouldn’t be too difficult to do, right? We’ll see…
December 27

Move Your iTunes Library (With Play Count, Rating, and Playlists) From A PC to a Mac

Thanks to this comment, I was able to successfully move an iTunes library from a PC to a Mac.  Here are the quick steps:

  1. Consolidate your PC’s iTunes library so that all of the music is in one location
  2. Move the entire iTunes folder (with XML file and ITL file — check the iTunes folder for these very important files) and media library location (if in a different location from iTunes folder) to an external drive
  3. Paste folder(s) into a temporary location on destination Mac
  4. Open the iTunes Library.xml file in a text editor and replace the directory path of each song/video with the new directory location of the Mac using Find and Replace (e.g., file://localhost/c:/iTunes/… to file://localhost/Users/username/Music…) — check out the Mac’s current iTunes XML file for the proper syntax
  5. Open the iTunes library .itl file in a text editor and delete the contents of the file (this will force iTunes to rebuild this file from the XML file that was just edited)
  6. Move the XML file and ITL file on the Mac to the Music/iTunes folder, which will replace the current XML and ITL files there.
  7. Open iTunes and let it work its magic to rebuild the ITL file.
  8. Ensure the the media library location is set to its proper location on the Mac.
  9. Consolidate the library