Tips and Tricks - Moving iTunes to a new computer

Long-time readers know that I have a serious love/hate relationship with Apple and iTunes in particular. GrrlGotGame and I used to be officers in an Apple/Mac users group more than a decade ago but have since defected to Windows. But the iPod and, more recently, iPhone enticed us back to the Apple side - at least for our music collection and now mobile apps.

Over the years, I have documented some painful iTunes mishaps. So I was prepared for the worst when it came time to move my iTunes installation from an old Windows XP PC that's about to become Pikachu Fan's schoolwork and occasional gaming computer to a newer Windows 7 machine. Thanks to some careful planning, I got it done in one day with almost no complications.

Part of this is thanks to my past pain caused by moving my main library to an external drive. Alas, I cannot advise you on how best to do this. Supposedly this can be accomplished by letting iTunes manage your library and telling it where you want it to be stored. I had really bad luck with this back in 2007 and spent a month or so restoring all of my disconnected music files so I could preserve the meta-data (ratings etc.). However, that paid off in making the migration to a new computer easier.

I have to credit this article from ilounge.com (scroll down to the "Moving your Content to a New Computer" section). They advised me to copy the main iTunes folder, which included all of my apps and older-gen iPod games as well as key library files. I made sure that both computers were running the same latest version of iTunes and completely backed up and sync'd both of our iPhones beforehand on the old machine - just in case something went horribly wrong. I then copied all of those files to the same place on the new computer.

And it worked! Well, almost. My iTunes preferences were NOT included - and apparently you shouldn't try to replace these since they are machine specific. So before you sync any devices, be sure to compare all of your iTunes preferences and make sure they match. VERY IMPORTANT: Your external hard drive with all of your music and video library files needs to be set to the same drive letter. Spot check your music and look for any little exclamation points that indicate a missing file. Confirm your videos (e.g., TV shows and movies) and podcasts are playable. Then hold your breath and sync.

I still have one small movie file to recover (ironically, it's that one about what would happen if Microsoft had designed the iPod packaging!) but otherwise the migration went off without a hitch. This is the first year in many that I have not complained about iTunes ruining my life. Hm, perhaps an iPad wouldn't be such a bad idea...