If you are music lovers it is logical that you have a multimedia library well ordered by artists, records, dates, etc. But what if we format the computer or want to transfer our entire library to another computer? It can be a nightmare to have to start from scratch.
To great evils, great remedies. iTunes allows us to transfer a library to any Windows or Mac computer with a few simple steps, so that our library will always come with us and it will always be updated and perfectly organized. In the following guide we will teach you how to transfer our entire iTunes library to another computer.
How to transfer an iTunes library to another computer
The following tutorial is made for Mac computers, but the system is the same for Windows computers. The difference is in the last step, with Windows having its own different path than the Mac path.
On our old computer
- We open the Finder and go to the folder Music. We will see a folder called iTunes.
- We copy the iTunes folder on a USB or external hard drive. It goes without saying that the capacity of the USB or external disk must be greater than the size of our library.
On our new computer
We will simply do the opposite way we did on the old computer.
- We connect our external disk or USB in the new computer.
- We navigate to the folder that contains the iTunes folder that we got from our old computer.
- We copy the iTunes folder inside the Music folder.
And that's it. I do this process every time I do a clean installation of OS X. All you have to do is have a little patience depending on the size of your library (in my case it is hundreds of gigabytes). Previously and with other players, I had to reorder my entire library every time I had to transfer it to another computer, but iTunes allows me with these simple steps to have an always updated library.
What if i keep the itunes library on an external disk does it work the same? Can iphones, etc be synced?
Yes. In fact, I have two libraries, one on HD and one (with movies) on my external drive. The bad thing is that having to consult a separate disc, it feels a little slower (typical: it starts rolling, etc). What you have to do in that case is to start iTunes with the ALT key pressed (I'm talking about Mac, I suppose that in Windows it is SHIFT) and select the library that we want.
Are podcasts also supported?
does this method also save the "stars" and the play count?
I'm not 100% sure, but I would say yes. One of the songs I've heard the most was because I fell asleep with it on a loop (xD) and I hardly heard it outside of that time. The almost 300 times that I have counted I would say that they were from then and I installed Yosemite OS X from 0.
I have the collection of cd's in an exclusive partition of the hard disk. When I reinstall the windows OS I have to register all the disks again. You could not copy a log or something similar and load the library again.
Thank you
Goodnight. Sorry, but I have never used iTunes on Windows. On Mac I open iTunes with the ALT key pressed and it allows me to choose the library I want. Try the same thing in Windows with the SHIFT key (I don't know if it will allow you to choose library).