iTunes help

[Felix The Assassin]

The spousal unit is getting a new PC. Her old PC does not have burn capability. She has several iTunes tracks to be transferred.

Can one use a thumb drive to save, then paste onto new PC and half hope that iTunes will recognize?

Is the back-up feature going to require me to slap an old burner into the old PC?

Pulling from the HDD is not an option as it's IDE and we all know modern technology is SATA.

AND, it's an antiquated XP rig! No it's not networked.

[Felix The Assassin]

Disregard last transmission. Apple has read the gripes and added a "Share" button under the advanced features tab. Life is good once again.

[wellard]

I still have a question .... I will be buying both my kids an I pod for xmas. Will they be able to share songs they have bought / downloaded or will they have to buy seperatly?

[Bungleau]

I have had success multiple times in the past by simply copying the entire My Music folder from one machine to another. I'm going to be assisting a friend with this in the next day or so... will note the details.

[wellard]

Thanks Bung, I will await the reply

[Hivetyrant]

Ipod's/iPhone's/iPad's can only Sync to one machine, that's the killer, however there are two easy options here for families.

1) You can sync multiple devices to one machine, so you can just have one PC as your "master" music machine and update all the iDevices to that one machine.

2) Finally Apple woke up and realised that the 1 machine - 1 device didn't really work too well, and build a thing called "Home sharing" into the new iTunes.
This allows all itunes machines on a wireless network to see each others library, the limitation being, you must use the same apple id to sign into the machines (this is because of DRM content)

That's a very basic run through, and it's not perfect, but it's better than it was in the past.. (Apple really like to control things)

[Bungleau]

Okay... didn't help my friend out yet, but in taking a look, here's what I've done in the past.... roughly. That means make backup copies of *everything*, just in case

Find your My Music folder. In there should be a folder called ITunes. This has all your ITunes stuff.

Copy the entire folder someplace. This will take a while... and this is your backup. Pay attention to disk capacity

Once your backup is complete, move the entire ITunes folder to the new destination.... networked computer or (potentially really) big thumb drive. Ultimate target destination is the My Music/ITunes folder on the new computer. If one already exists, rename it to something else to back it up.

That's about it!

However, your iPod can be authorized on up to five devices at a time. If you're shutting down the old PC, you might want to deauthorize it on that one. Once a computer is gone, the only way to clear an old authorization is to completely wipe out every existing authorization and reset them to zero.

And before you start, read that second sentence again. Backups... they're not a law, they're just a damned good idea....

I *think* when you open ITunes again, you may need to do some fiddling around in there... somewhere in Edit, Preferences, Advanced, I think. But it's been a while... double-check it to be sure.

And back it up a couple of times, just for good measure

[wellard]

Thankyou gentlemen (and hivetyrant)

[Felix The Assassin]

Two points of interest.

1. Under "Home Sharing", I was able to catalog her entire iTunes folder onto my machine, after "authorizing it", same account and password as the original account.

2. With this new iTunes 10.1.1.4, there is a function called "Back-up to disc", which then allowed me to burn her entire library to DVD. Makes things way simple!