migrating iTunes files

[Jason Davies]

Dear Smuggers,

I may have complicated my life unnecessarily here...

I have a 2010 Mac Pro with oodles of disk space, including all my music, TV and films. Some from iTunes/Apple, much is not. When I moved to a mac mini in December, I left all the files there (nearly 2 TB) and kept syncing my iPhone and iPad with it as the Mac mini had tiny amounts of space.

Now I'm trying to move that too and am not sure how to approach it. When I used Migration Assistant to move to the Mac mini, it must have analysed the iTunes library into discrete libraries for TV, Music etc. Short of re-migrating (not an option), how can I carry over the info in the iTunes library and the files, keeping the links live? (I've had terrible problems in the past with this when moving the library, loads gets lost even when I do it from within iTunes via Consolidate Library).

I'd rather not simply import all the files as that will create duplicates in music (I have iTunes Match) and set everything to 'unwatched'.

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Jason

[Toby Leighton]

iTunes Match will handle all the music for you reasonably smartly if you let it.  

Only place I could see being an issue is if you have ripped a lot of your own music in Lossless or a higher bitrate than 256. Apple will not move your originals but download a 256 AAC file which would probably not be to your liking. 

When I do this between computers I then transport my AIFFs or lossless files to the new library, which creates duplicates as you mention and then I keep the better file. 

Since I know match does this for any song of 256 or greater, music lets you filter by type and bitrate so it’s not a surprise which ones it will choose to do this with. 

I have never tried any of this with movies or video of any kind... no idea how that kind of thing works. 

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[Jason Davies]

On 25 May 2021, at 17:00, Toby Leighton wrote:

> Only place I could see being an issue is if you have ripped a lot of
> your own music in Lossless or a higher bitrate than 256.

yup, I should have said that. I have thousands of items, and am not in
the slightest bit interested in debugging duplicates;) Many of them are
live recordings I could not get again.

Match only downloads their copies if it matches them to something in the
iTunes store. If you upload something it doesn't recognise, you get your
original file. But it's all so hit and miss and a lot of my stuff is
irreplaceable. I already have complex mechanisms for when (not if)
iTunes/Music decides to simply remove albums from my library (about once
every couple of months I realise something is missing entirely and go to
my copy of it). I've also become wary of buying one song from an album
as it will randomly swap it for a different song on the same album (rare
but it's happened to me).

It's a shame iTunes killed off the competition because it's so bad at
what it does.

Cheers,

Jason