One way to migrate an iTunes collection to another drive

Jun 18, '08 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: schneb

I use iTunes for not only my extensive music and audio library, but my vast video library as well. The collection had become so large that I needed to copy all the files to a new, larger drive. My troubles began with iTunes unintuitive linking. Library consolidation scared me, in that it would mess up my hierarchal structure. If I reimported my videos, all my meticulous metadata would be lost. Naming the new drive the same as the old worked, but would break the link if anything within the link structure moved or changed due to the inode reference database. In other words, I must reimport from the new drive (and thus lose all my metadata).

After days of experimenting, I came up with a solution that did the trick. With iTunes off, I copied all my music and video files to the new drive. I also copied my iTunes Library folder to the new drive as well (I prefer keeping all on one drive). I then unmounted my old drive and launched iTunes. Of course, iTunes could not locate the iTunes Library, so I pointed to the new location. I then saw all my music and videos as if all was well -- but alas, none of the links to the various media files were correct. (Here is where Spotlight should have automatically re-established the links globally; sigh.)

The great question now is, "How do I relink all the music and videos?" I could either take a year and relink each file one at a time or, I can delete all the iTunes files, reimport and take another year re-entering my metadata. Both approaches were unacceptable.

I was overjoyed to find that there was a simple solution -- I needed to keep all of the music/video information and organization intact and unchanged in iTunes. So I reimported all the files into iTunes. This created a duplicate of each file -- one broken, the other not. The wonderful thing is that all the album art, poster frames, and metadata notations duplicate as well! Since you cannot sort via the link warning symbol, the good news is that you can sort by "Date Added." Your unlinked files are now all grouped together, thus allowing you to shift-select all the unlinked files and delete.

The result is properly inode-referenced files on a new drive with all your original iTunes organizational structure and information intact.

[robg adds: This older hint offered another method, however, it relied on using the "consolidate music" setting.]

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