Go go lazyweb!
Here’s the deal: I usually use my PC to listen to music but having just moved back home, there’s no room to set it up. Therefore I’ve instead copied a small subset of that music onto my iBook and will be using that instead for the next few months – iPod syncing et al.
This is great, but just copying the files over causes me to lose ratings and play counts, which are in turn vital for the Smart Playlists that are used to fill my iPod.
Both my iTunes/Win and iTunes/Mac music libraries were set to have the music organised by iTunes, therefore the music has the same names and subdirectory structure on both machines. The difference is just the location of the library: file://localhost/D:/All%20Users/Music/ on the PC and file://localhost/benward/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/ on the Mac.
Now, I’ve had suggestions of mirroring the entire PC Library onto the Mac and then just trimming out the music I don’t want, but there isn’t enough disc space. Nor is there enough disc space on the PC the mirror it locally, trim it and then migrate the whole lot to the Mac.
My attempted solution has been to copy ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ file from the PC to the iBook and use Find+Replace to change the paths to the files. If this worked it would leave about 3000 dead tracks in my iBook Library, but I suspect that can be cleaned up with a script afterwards.
Trouble is, find and replace doesn’t work. I amend the PC library’s paths, delete the iTunes library files and place the modified XML in the Mac’s iTunes Music directory. Restarting iTunes opens with an empty default Library, replacing my hacked version.
So, does anyone understand the iTunes XML PList better than me and fancy a guess at the hacking required to migrate it?
Thanks.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.