I've finally documented how I moved my iTunes collection intact from Windows XP to the new iMac!
Before blindly copying everything and ending up losing my song ratings and presets and playlists, etc for my gigantic 8600 song collection, I decided to RTFM first (one of those rare cases where its worth reading up before acting!).
My music collection is split into two segments:
1. The real iTunes collection, imported and sorted by artist etc in iTunes. This has my purchases from the music store when I was in the US and all the CDs I have imported into iTunes.
2. The other music from before iTunes for Windows came out. This is sorted by Genre and stored in a separate folder that had been manually and painstakingly imported by dragging directory after directory into the iTunes Library.
These are the steps I followed:
1. Using the backups I had created earlier (
Backing up my data), I copied two folders over to the iMac (the iTunes Music and the other music).
2. I setup the iMac's sharing services to share my user directory on Samba.
3. I mounted my Mac user directory on the Windows PC as a separate drive (say Z:)
3. Now, I edited the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file on the Windows PC, using Find & Replace to redirect all directory references to the two folders in Z:
This is the critical step, without this, iTunes will just over-write and ignore the changes made to the xml file!
4. I opened the “iTunes Library.itl” file (also on the Windows PC) and deleted its contents, then save. This file is a binary version of the xml file, derived and updated by iTunes every time changes are made to the library.
The idea here is, Apple keeps a backup in the xml file, so the binary data can be derived at any time!
5. I then ran iTunes. As expected, it complained that the Library was corrupted and began re-constructing it from the xml file. This took ages as it had to run through all 8600 songs' data and verify their locations on the remote drive (Z:)
6. Once this was done, I now had an iTunes installation on Windows using music that was actually stored on the Mac!
Final step!
I was now content that I was almost done, and that I would now just have to copy the xml file to the iMac, find and replace Z: with the local path, delete the contents of the binary “iTunes Library.itl” and open iTunes.
7. I copied the two library files “iTunes Music Library.xml” and “iTunes Library.itl” to my iMac, and then, trusting one of the articles I had read earlier (referenced below), just took the chance and ran iTunes.
And it worked! iTunes came up, said it was translating the library, and the entire song collection came up, with ratings, last played, # of times played, my precious playlists, the iPod settings, everything!
There was just one hitch however, I had to re-signup for all the podcasts - somehow this transfer method does not retain he podcast subscriptions.
References:
iTunes library transfer · made in costa rica by josue salazar
How to Safely Move Your iTunes Music Directory to a New Drive
Google Search: transferring itunes library from windows
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Ram Viswanathan