How to Migrate Your Apple iTunes Library

/* Posted August 21st, 2008 at 11:29am */
/* Filed under Apple, Music, iPhone, iPod */
/* */

itunes about How to Migrate Your Apple iTunes Library

If full automatic sync’ing is to be utilized in iTunes, your iPhone or iPod can only be sync’ed with one music library on one computer. This isn’t really a big issue until you upgrade or migrate to another one. What about your painstakingly organized iTunes library? The process is actually pretty painless, especially if you’ve got an arrangement like mine.

If your entire library is contained within your iTunes folder at the default location, it could not be any simpler. Simply copy your iTunes folder to the same location on your new computer. Then download iTunes from Apple and install it. It will automatically pick up all your old music from your old library.

If some of your library is in iTunes but some of it is in a different location, it could still be easy depending on your setup. You should still follow the same step above but you’ll need to do some extra work. For me, all my music was on a different internal hard drive, so when I switched to the new machine, I took that hard drive out and installed it in my new computer, keeping the drive letter the same. Don’t worry if it’s different. In this case open up “iTunes Music Library.xml” in your iTunes folder (located in My Documents\My Music\iTunes for me) in your favorite text editor (I highly recommend freeware Crimson Editor) and do a find and replace. You’ll want to do a find on the old path, and a replace with the new path.

itunes xml How to Migrate Your Apple iTunes Library

Let’s come up with a sample scenario: Your old music was on D:\Albums and your new library is now on E:\Music. You can see the old path in the .xml file above. Execute a search and replace in your text editor and you will get a prompt similar to this:

itunes xml replace How to Migrate Your Apple iTunes Library

Hit the replace all and sit back and wait. Depending on how big your library is, it may take some time to modify the whole file (mine was 8MB).

Once this completes, exit your text editor and install iTunes. It will automatically pick up your newly migrated iTunes library.

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One Response to “How to Migrate Your Apple iTunes Library”

Comment from kobe

/* August 29, 2008 at 1:35 am */

isn’t this kind of unnecessary? can’t i just set a new default folder on the new machine, then just copy what was on the old machine to that actual folder, and be done with it?

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