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May
11

HOWTO: Move your iTunes music while preserving library data (when you don’t let iTunes manage your music library)

iTunes desktop iconIt all depends on whether or not you let iTunes manage your music library:

  • If you do, then moving your music while preserving library data (playlists, play counts, etc.) is pretty trivial and documentation provided by Apple has got you covered (check “Part 1” in the guide that follows).
  • If you don’t (which is the user group I belong to), things are a bit harder, and instructions on the Internet are pretty rare to find (took a lot of Googlin’). It’s basically a two-part process.

Before we begin, let me state the obvious—keep backups, more than one if possible. If after following my instructions something goes wrong and your music files and/or library are messed up, I shouldn’t be help responsible. Follow the instructions at your own risk, etc. For what it’s worth, I did what I’m describing here a couple of days ago and it worked without a hitch.

UPDATE: It’s also important to note that this definitely works with iTunes 6; I haven’t tried it with iTunes 7 though.

So, with this out of the way:

Part 1

Music that you rip with iTunes is imported in the iTunes Music folder—that’s usually C:Documents and SettingsUsernameMy DocumentsMy MusiciTunesiTunes Music. Same goes for podcasts that you download with iTunes (look for a folder named Podcasts in the aforementioned path. Here’s what you have to do to move those files:

  1. Go to Edit → Preferences → Advanced → General. Click Change and choose a new path for your files—e.g. D:MusiciTunes.
  2. Quit iTunes.
  3. Open the iTunes Music folder, select everything in there (try a Ctrl+A) and copy it to the new location. As the “Help” page notes: “Do not drag the entire iTunes Music folder, only its contents.”
  4. Restart iTunes and your moved tunes are automagically found.

Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library in iTunesIf you let iTunes manage your music library (in Edit → Preferences → Advanced → General, the box “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” is checked √) with the aforementioned method you’ve moved your whole library, so you can stop reading here.

Part 2

You’ve moved your iTunes podcasts and iTunes rips but what happens with the rest of your music that you have indexed with iTunes?

First, a note. In C:Documents and SettingsUsernameMy DocumentsMy MusiciTunes there are two important files (among other stuff):

  • iTunes Library.itl
  • iTunes Music Library.xml

If you open the former with a text editor, you’ll just see garbage (not human-readable characters) so there’s nothing we can do with it. If you open the latter, you’ll see a nicely formatted XML file with references to the file paths for each of your music files.

So, great! ? You may wonder: “why not move my music to the new location, edit the XML file to reflect the new paths, launch iTunes and go?” Because iTunes doesn’t actually read this file—it’s using the ITL file (which we can’t edit accordingly).

But as Schmolle found out… if the ITL file is corrupted or damaged, then iTunes will revert to the XML file in order to rebuild it (and consequently, your library data). So the plan is to edit the XML file to reflect the changes in our file paths, and somehow damage the ITL file in order to get iTunes to rebuild it from our revised XML file. If this sounded a bit complicated, worry not—we describe the actions needed step-by-step below:

  1. Quit iTunes.
  2. Backup your iTunes Music folder—this contains your library data. Now that it’s relieved from your podcasts and iTunes rips it’s considerably lighter too, so do an additional backup or two just to be on the safe side. Do this. Now.
  3. Move your music files (those indexed by iTunes that are neither iTunes podcasts nor iTunes rips) from the old location (say, C:Documents and SettingsUsernameMy DocumentsMy MusicNon-iTunes) to the new location (say, D:MusicNon-iTunes).
  4. Open the "iTunes Library.itl" file. Select all text (Ctrl+A) and delete it. The file is now blank, with zero characters on it—save it. iTunes Library.itl’s filesize should now be 0 bytes. (This is important, as Schmolle notes, because some unicode aware editors—e.g. UltraEdit—may add invisible characters to the beginning of the file.)
  5. Open the "iTunes Music Library.xml" and do a global search and replace with your text editor of choice. A screenshot of how this is done in EditPad Lite, a freeware text editor that’s light and powerful follows after the end of this list.
  6. Save the XML file.
  7. Launch iTunes. A prompt with a progress bar will come up—iTunes is rebuilding your library. Depending on how powerful your computer is and the size of your music library, this may take a while. When this ends, iTunes will come up with a message saying that the library file was corrupted/damaged and it tried to rebuild things for you. Press “OK”, iTunes finally launches.
  8. Check to see if all your music and playlists are there, and if library data (play counts, etc.) has been preserved. (Hopefully everything’s fine.) You’ll also notice a couple of additional static playlists for your podcasts, videos, etc. UPDATE: Simon notes in the comments section:
    As a minor aside, this approach ‘loses’ the date and timestamp when the file was originally added. This instead becomes the date and time that the track was (re)added to the library during the rebuild. That said, while this slightly messes-up any ‘recently added’ playlists, it somehow maintains the correct sequence (i.e. the rebuild seems to occur in the same sequence in which the mp3s were originally added, so one can still sort the library/playlist by ‘date file added’ and see the newest ones at the bottom).
  9. You’re almost done.

(EditPad Lite screenshot—click for larger size:)

Search & replace in EditPad

By almost we mean:

  • all the columns in iTunes have been resetted. You’ll have to re-select those columns that you want to be viewable for each playlist, and resize them if necessary.
  • your podcast subscriptions have been lost. Do the following:
    1. Show genre when browsingGo to Edit → Preferences → General and see that “Show Genre when browsing” is checked √). Press the “OK” button.
    2. Choose Edit → Show Browser.
    3. Go to your Library. From the first column of the browser (the Genre one), choose “Podcast”. In the third column of the browser (Album) those albums you see are the podcasts you were subscribed to do. Click on each “album” (podcast), choose all of its “songs” (the podcast’s shows), and drag them to Podcasts in the Source column—see screenshot after the end of this list.
    4. Go to Podcasts, you’ll now see a collapsed entry for the podcast you just dragged and next to it a “Subscribe” button—click on it to re-subscribe to this podcast. (If you click the arrow to expand the entry you’ll see that all of the podcast’s shows that you dragged from the Library are there.)
    5. Repeat process for each podcast you want to re-subscribe to.

(Screenshot that shows how to move podcasts from the Library view to Podcasts—click for larger size:)

Move podcasts in iTunes

You’re done, that’s pretty much it.

Thanks to Schmolle—without his findings I’d have probably never figured that out. I just brought his guide a bit up-to-date, and added Part 1 and the podcasts section.

If you’re on a Mac, the process should be similar except your "iTunes Library.itl" file is simply "iTunes Library" (without an extension). (UPDATE: Rich confirms that it works.)

For those switching to Mac and wanting to carry their music and library data over, I’d like to know if the following works (i.e. AFAIK nobody’s tested this):

  1. blanking your "iTunes Library" file (on the Mac)
  2. bringing over your "iTunes Music Library.xml" (from the PC) revised with the updated filepaths (for the Mac)

Finally, if you want to move your music from a “traditional” hard drive to a NAS (network attached storage) device, you may also want to read Simon’s comment.

If you try it, let me know how it went. Furthermore, if you’ve got anything to add, or feel like sharing a relevant tip or two, leave a comment.

UPDATES:

  • (June 27th, 2006) Added notes on NAS devices, lost “date added” timestamps.
  • (March 14th, 2008) Does the rebuilbing of the ITL file stuck? Do you have songs with Japanese/Chinese characters? If you answered “yes” to both questions, read llyse’s comment.

MORE: ,
BY: Konstantinos Christidis | 07:16 PM

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223 comments so far. (RSS)

  1. Great stuff! This will come in handy soon.

    ...added by Paul Stamatiou /// May 12th, 2006 at 00:20 AM

  2. Thanks Paul.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 12th, 2006 at 00:32 AM

  3. When I got my new headphones, I realized that I can’t enjoy 128kbps mp3’s anymore. I needed to go quality to make my investment worth it. That meant FLAC, so I reripped all my CD’s to FLAC files, and then I remembered that iTunes doesn’t support that format, amongst others (.ogg, too.) So I searched around, and settled on MediaMonkey, which allows me to manage my large music collection.

    While it’s not as intuitive as iTunes, it’ll get the job done, at least until Songbird comes out.

    ...added by Matt Burris /// May 15th, 2006 at 21:49 PM

  4. Oh Matt, you’re doing a killer job in the research department. MediaMonkey is probably my favorite app when it comes to organizing my music library—a huge array of music formats supported, plus scripts/plugins to extend the app’s capabilities. The latter takes the app to whole new level.

    By the way, if you want high-quality files and want to stay with iTunes, you could always go with the Apple Lossless format. It’s the result of Apple messing with FLAC (they’re pretty similar), but obviously with FLAC you’re giving the finger to proprietary formats.

    RE: Songbird… well, here you go.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 17th, 2006 at 01:53 AM

  5. Just to let you know, works perfectly on a MAC!

    Thanks for the tips.

    Rich

    ...added by Rich /// June 6th, 2006 at 07:24 AM

  6. Thanks for this! I finally got my iTunes library moved over to my new computer.

    ...added by Chris /// June 9th, 2006 at 06:08 AM

  7. Thanks, this’ll make a great bookmark. Just know it will come in handy some day.

    ...added by Olav /// June 13th, 2006 at 20:12 PM

  8. I moved my 20+ gigs of music to my daughters computer using the “drag and drop” method from a network folder on our wireless network. Unfortunately I didn’t have the “let iTunes manage the files” option checked on hers so it cataloged everything as being on the network drive and didn’t copy it to her hard drive. Unfortunately (again), I didn’t realize why it had done that so I simply copied all the files to the iTunes folder.

    Your method flawlessly let me get her up and running preserving playlists, “last added” list, etc. Everything was intact.

    I’ve done a LOT of research on how to fix my error and this is the most effective and succint description I’ve seen.

    One bit of advice for Windows users: use Word Pad, not Notepad for doing the “find and replace”, particularly if it’s a large .xml file. Mine was 7+ MB and Notepad totally choked on it. Word Pad handled it in about 3 minutes.

    Thanks again. Brilliant work.

    c.

    ...added by Chris Savage /// June 20th, 2006 at 15:53 PM

  9. Thank you for the kind words, Chris—glad the article was of help!

    Also, thank you for the tip regarding WordPad.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// June 20th, 2006 at 17:38 PM

  10. I have just sucsesfully transfered the library ratings etc etc from my PC to my new and wonderful MacBook Pro. But what I needed to do was to export the library in the file menu of the PC then do the editing of the XML file it generated to have the right URL for the Mac. Next I moved the music files and the newly edited XML file to the Mac. Deleted any prior XML files and the ITL file from the mac. when I opend the itunes in the mac nouthing showed so I hit file import and seleced the new XML file and Voila!

    Thanks for the help

    Ben

    ...added by Ben /// June 21st, 2006 at 00:08 AM

  11. I was wondering where the sudden surge of emails with ‘thank you’ notes came from—now I know :)

    Kudos to you for a well written article, including the things that I never felt knowledgeable enough to write about myself.

    I’ll silently share the thank you’s lavished on you. Pity my own (freebie) hosting doesn’t allow for commenting facilities…

    ...added by Schmolle /// June 21st, 2006 at 21:31 PM

  12. Hey Schmolle, I really appreciate your comment. You are the one who should be thanked for coming up with this clever solution.

    Thanks!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// June 22nd, 2006 at 13:26 PM

  13. This is exactly what i was looking for! I just reformated my computer and in doing changed the computer name from something random to my first name. Then of course windows doesn’t let me use my first name as the username cause it’s the computer name. Curses. So I to set my username to first+last and as such change the path to my music.

    I have been looking all over for how to get the data into itunes from the XML and you finally gave me the answer. Thanks so much!

    ...added by Gidgidonihah /// June 26th, 2006 at 10:42 AM

  14. This is great!

    I needed to move my mp3’s from a Maxtor to a Yellow Machine (a superb 1 terrabyte RAID5 drive – see www.yellowmachine.com) and iTunes was preventing me because it viewed the Yellow Machine as a separate ‘machine’.

    (This seems to be because the Yellow Machine operates as a ‘server’ connected by 10/100 whereas iTunes viewed the Maxtor as a HDD with a letter like H: or whatever, because it hung off a specific PC via USB2.0 or Firewire, and thus Advanced -> Consolidate library will work with the Maxtor but won’t work for the Yellow Machine.)

    By moving the mp3’s to the Yellow Machine, and using this hack to re-point iTunes to the new location, I can now use iTunes on all machines on my home network to play from the ‘server’ drive … even a laptop in the garden via WiFi, which beats even AirTunes!

    As a tip, it is useful to pick one track to determine the format for the source and destination before launching-in headlongt.

    Hence consider this approach:

    1. Pick one track (e.g. go into iTunes, sort the library by artist, and pick an obscure artist for which you only have one track)

    2. Quit iTunes, and use explorer to copy from the source folder (for me H:My Music) the FOLDER for this artist (i.e the chain of artistname -> albumname -> trackname.mp3) over to the destination drive

    3. Open iTunes and use File -> Add file to library to add the track from the dsetination drive into the iTunes library (it will appear to be duplicated, but right-click -> Get info on each entry should give different locations: one source, one destination)

    4. Quit iTunes, backup the xml and ita files as described above, and use Wordpad to empty the ita file to zero bytes as described above

    5. Then use Wordpad to look at the xml library and find the two entries of the chosen artist (one on the source and one on the destination). In each case, once FIND has found the artist’s name, scroll down a few lines until you see the line describing the file’s location which you should write out on paper VERY VERY carefully. For example, for me the source was file://localhost/H:/My%20Music/... and the destination was file://localhost/YmXXXYYY/disk1/My%20Music/iTunes/... (where XXXYYY is the last part of the MAC address of my Yellow Machine)

    5. Go back to the top of the xml library (this is important, otherwise it won’t replace everything!) and use Replace All. For me that meant replace-all file://localhost/H:/My%20Music
    with
    file://localhost/YmXXXYYY/disk1/My%20Music/iTunes

    6. Save and quit Wordpad

    7. Open iTunes … and wait (a long time if you have thousands of mps3) and hit ‘ok’ when it tells you the library was corrupt and needs to be rebuilt

    And hey presto, it all works, and all the rating info etc. is preserved.

    As a minor aside, this approach ‘loses’ the date and timestamp when the file was originally added. This instead becomes the date and time that the track was (re)added to the library during the rebuild. That said, while this slightly messes-up any ‘recently added’ playlists, it somehow maintains the correct sequence (i.e. the rebuild seems to occur in the same sequence in which the mp3’s were originally added, so one can still sort the library/playlist by ‘date file added’ and see the newest ones at the bottom).

    Again, thanks. (And long live Yellow Machines!)

    ...added by Simon /// June 26th, 2006 at 12:14 PM

  15. Woah, Simon that’s what I call a thorough and helpful comment.

    I went ahead and added your last paragraph (the one regarding dates and timestamps) in the article—I had missed that, thanks for noting it.

    I’ve also included a link to your comment for those wanting to move their music to a NAS (network attached storage) device, such as the Yellow Machine you’re using.

    Much appreciated—thanks for sharing your tips!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// June 27th, 2006 at 12:32 PM

  16. I store our 20GB+ music on a Buffalo station from which all 4 family members access the music for their personal iTunes. The Buffalo station crapped out, but luckily I had backed up all the music on a second Buffalo. I went through all the Apple help files and BBS messages looking for a way to have the iTunes point to the new location, but couldn’t find one till I came across this site. I tried this and it worked perfectly. Thank you!

    ...added by Russell Siegelman /// July 3rd, 2006 at 17:40 PM

  17. Wow. I was fighting over a solution to my problem for awhile. Went over to the Apple forums and someone pointed me to this article, and I must say, it worked like a charm. Thanks for taking the time to work out this nice tip…

    ...added by Adam /// July 4th, 2006 at 15:37 PM

  18. Found a neat little script for mac users to use after doing this tip. Don’t know if it’ll work on windows, but you can give it a try. It lets you change the view options for any/all your playlists (you can choose whatever playlists you want) to mirror what your Library’s options are. Came in very handy for me after moving my music.

    ...added by Adam /// July 4th, 2006 at 22:29 PM

  19. Adam: thank you both for your kind words and the link to the script—our Mac friends will appreciate it.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// July 5th, 2006 at 00:43 AM

  20. hello, I have tried this and it works! Thanks for the help. But I am not really completely satisfied with this as it was posted that the timestamp will be lost. that’s what also want to preserve. do you happen to know a program or a script that would do the same thing but it would also preserve that timestamps. I’ve tried to use iTune Library Updater and hopefully it would work, but it didn’t. I was hoping that a program would actually hack the ITL file and take the managing the stuff from there. I am assuming that the programs that are currently available are just scripts like applescript. Is it possible to create a script that would:

    1. search for the file that are dead (! sign)
    2. check what is the current location information of the file in the ITL file
    3. Modify that information.

    hope that someone has created such program because I have a habit of reformating my hardisk every year. why? there is no registry cleaning program that is effective as reformating your hardisk. :)

    ...added by Francis /// July 5th, 2006 at 08:20 AM

  21. Hey, I had to make a laptop switch and up until now, I’ve been struggling with how to reestablish all of my play counts and playlists. I’d used a program called sharepod but it didn’t do everything I’d hoped it would. I had my old iTunes library file from the old laptop, though and I knew that there was some way that I could get iTunes to use that one instead of the new one it had created. Copying my old itl and xml files in place of the new ones and then erasing the contents of the itl file did the trick. Thank you so much. I now have my beloved playlists and playcounts.

    I do have one problem. I believe that it was caused by sharepod which was what I used to transfer the music from my iPod to the new laptop. I had some song titles and artists in Hebrew font and they’ve all been reversed so that they now read left to right (incorrectly). I was wondering if you had any ideas about how to correct this or could point me in the right direction for some Hebrew text support for iTunes. I know that this is a somewhat obscure request and somewhat of a shot in the dark but if you can help…

    ...and if not, thanks so much for your helpful post.

    ...added by Daniel /// July 5th, 2006 at 09:34 AM

  22. Daniel: I couldn’t find anything related to iTunes and Hebrew text support—sorry!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// July 12th, 2006 at 23:57 PM

  23. Fantastic! I’d been all over the web trying to fix this and finally this solution did the trick! Many thanks for the post.

    ...added by Cams Campbell /// July 31st, 2006 at 16:13 PM

  24. Migrating iTunes from PC to Mac and preserving play counts:

    I don’t allow iTunes to organize my music and needed to transfer library and playlists from Win to Mac.

    Installed iTunes on my new Mac, copied all of my song files from the iTunes Music folder on the PC to the new location on the Mac.

    Opened the PC iTunes Music Library.xml and did a Find and Replace as directed in Part 2 above, where I searched for the PC location and replaced it with the Mac location. I then saved this file on my Mac.

    I then deleted the iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml on my new Mac, moved the edited .xml file to the directory where the deleted file was. I then copied the PC iTunes Library.itl file to that same Mac directory and—voila!—when I opened iTunes on the Mac, all of my songs, playlists, counts and dates played where successfully brought over from the PC to the Mac.

    Since I want my Mac (@work) and my PC (@home) to have the same playlists and counts, will attempt to use my iPod to keep both lists update. Will advise if this experiment works.

    (Konstantino: Evharisto for the great site!)

    ...added by gShash /// August 8th, 2006 at 16:01 PM

  25. gShash, Cams and everyone: thank you for your kind words, I appreciate them.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// August 8th, 2006 at 20:04 PM

  26. HI All:

    I have been reading the rather exhaustive solution above and have been unable to find an answer to my current problem. I would like to apologize in advance for posting an issue not directly related to the above but a by problem I have encountered as a product of a process in line with the general theme in this thread.

    I have posted the following on iLounge but with no results and unfortunately while I can play my music I can’t back anything up. I hope that with the added knowledge base of the readers of this thread my songs can be found (which really are there!). Thanks.

    HDD was getting full so I purchased an external drive and followed itunes/support instructions:

    1. Moved the itunes music folder to the external drive. [all 43.7gb].
    2. Edit—> Preferences—> Advanced > changed the location to the external folder
    3. Clicked yes to keep music folder organized be itunes

    1 week later: I wanted to backup the external drive to another external drive and began using that drive instead (I did make the change to iTunes by repeating steps 2 & 3). Every time I loaded itunes the computer would look for the external drive (assuming it to be mapped to the same drive letter) and if it was mapped to a different letter, it would show excalamation mark in the itunes folder. To remedy this I assigned a drive letter to the external drive as explained here.

    At the office I dock the tablet pc and plug in the external drive (the ibm dock covers the usb port) so I have to plug it into another port. This required telling iTunes where the external drive is (repeating steps 2 & 3). Unfortunately, whilst doing this exercise I might have clicked and stopped the keep itunes folder organized process mid-way. I still see all the songs in iTunes, however in the external drive when I open the folder only albums beginning with letters A & B are listed, with only about 1/2 of the ones beginning with B.

    The size of this folder is 1.7 mb versus the iTunes library which is 43.7gb

    I would like to move the folder to antoher drive and also back it up and/or share within the allowed 5 authorized computers, however with Windows Explorer only recognizing 1.7gb I am at a loss.Currently am not panicking because I know its somewhere as I am able to play the songs. I randomly chose tracks beginning with differnt letters of the alphabet and they all play fine. I also am able to sync my GV 60gb ipod and get new playlists. I would really appreciate help on this and have tried in vain to find the solution in these forums. Thanks. PLEASE HELP: been almost 2 weeks since I have been able to use itunes as I have no idea where it will store the files.

    I checked the external disk (Maxtor II) and found that about approx. 40gb is accounted for. I.E:

    Free Space: 86.5
    Total Size: 233

    Checking each folder within the drive I find less than 100 being used by all current files. I do have a month old backup on another drive (Western Digital 250gb) which contains 43 gb of music (7,000 files) of which I can only see a handful in the folder I currently sync with. Besides assigning a drive letter, and possibly stopping itunes in an activity (mentioned above), both of which I have tried to since correct (removed the drive letter signing and after changing the drive location in itunes/advanced I ran the short exercise (Which itunes does to account for all file locations) but still nothing. I cannot fathom what might be the issue! I have run disk check and disk defrag to no avail.

    PLEASE HELP. Shall I just copy the old on top of the new? If I do, will I permamently lose the 40gb of space? How might it affect my itunes library (playlists, albums, etc.) which is the most important thing here…

    ...added by Babar /// August 13th, 2006 at 07:42 AM

  27. Hello,

    A friend pointed me to the solution above and I just have a couple questions before I format my hard disk. I have a master and secondary hard disk on my computer. Whilst iTunes and Windows are installed on the Primary Drive, all of the music is on the secondary drive.

    When you insert a CD into iTunes, it usually imports the correct information from CDDB, but a mixed CD will be unrecognized, and sometimes the CDDB for a legitimate disc is incorrect. So, I use the GET INFO pages to edit all of this and set my music the way I like it. Upon reinserting that same CD, iTunes will display the preserved information previously entered. Where is this information stored (Such as track names, album title, etc. especially if you don’t import the music, just play it from the disc)?

    Also, when importing music, I will often have to edit all of the track numbers in the Album for them to appear in order.

    The point of all of this, is it is well overdue that I format my Master hard disk. The above method seems to preserve the playlists, but will it store the CD names?

    Also, when you edit the start and stop times for tracks (to eliminate long gaps of silence at ends of tracks, for example), will it preserve these START and STOP times?

    I have spent much time organizing my library, and I don’t want to go through and reedit all of the track start times, playlists, etc. I am not familiar with the iTunes jargon (counts…??), so sorry if I’m actually posing a redundant question. Will the above method give me the results I want? Will it restore CD names for mixed/compiled CD’s, and CD’s whose track information I have edited? Will it preserve start and stop times for tracks?

    Thank you all so much for your time,

    Steve

    ...added by Steve Bristo /// August 17th, 2006 at 16:34 PM

  28. Ok, I’m not really helping here, but I have questions. For one, I just got a Mac Pro, and I had all my iTunes music on a PC at home and on a 4th gen. iPod. The way I went about transfering my songs was from my iPod. I downloaded TinkerTool, which allowed me to view Hidden files on the Mac. So I simply copied all my music from the iPod onto my Mac, then imported the music into iTunes. I had done this before on my PC, and it worked flawlessly. Now, when I tried it on my Mac, some of the songs in iTunes will randomly stop and skip to the next song. I go back to the song that skipped, and it skips at the same time as before. The songs do not skip on my iPod or on the PC iTunes library, only on my Mac. The whole song file is there, because if i skip past the point in the song where it “skips,” the rest of the song plays to the end. I also tried converting the song (already and AAC file) to AAC, but the newly converted song has an endpoint where the original song skips. Example: say a song is 2:35 long, and it skips at 0:47. The converted song is only 0:47 long. Is there any way to fix this? Where there files corrupted upon uploading to my Mac? Does my iPod being formatted for Windows play any role into my scenario? And I’m not exactally sure how to go about the process of doing what everyone else is. Am I supposed to have my PC and Mac connected? Or do I use an external Hard drive? Sorry for being difficult/dumb. I just don’t want to have to upload every single CD again, or loose my music all together.

    ...added by Brian /// August 22nd, 2006 at 02:16 AM

  29. ...was struggling to migrate my iTunes collection from PC to my brand new iMac…till I found this site. Works great. Thanks!

    ...added by Glenn /// August 23rd, 2006 at 21:19 PM

  30. You sir (Schmolle too =D), are a complete legend. I think you have just saved me about a months worth of trouble.

    ...added by Jamie /// August 27th, 2006 at 21:53 PM

  31. I managed to move the library data with this great guide, but all track ratings were removed from the newly created XML file after importing the library.
    Is it somehow possible to maintain the ratings also?

    ...added by blubalu /// September 2nd, 2006 at 15:33 PM

  32. blubalu: ratings are supposed to be preserved—maybe you did something wrong in the process?

    Jamie, Glenn: thank you for the kind words.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// September 2nd, 2006 at 20:28 PM

  33. Theres no need to mess around with the ITL file.

    1) Copy your XML file to a convenient location, anywhere will do as long as its not your default itunes folder. Keep a back-up or two in case you screw up.

    2) Replace the paths in the XML file with your preferred text-editor as detailed above.

    3) Open itunes and go to file—> import. Find and choose your edited XML file.

    For some reason, the XML file uses regular slashes ( / ) in the paths as opposed to the backslash ( ) that is used in windows explorer. In other words, use regular slashes ( / ) when replacing the paths or else it wont work.

    ...added by Andreas /// September 5th, 2006 at 04:16 AM

  34. Great information. Thanks for sharing it here.

    My question relates to limitations of size of library in Tunes. I remember reading a long time ago that there were issues. But I haven’t read much about that lately. Has it been resolved?

    I see that others have large collections, which I am guilty of. Over the 40 Gig mark. Is there any danger in having a library that size? Is there any way to create more than one library?

    Any information would be greatly appreciated.

    ...added by eli mina /// September 10th, 2006 at 00:54 AM

  35. Eli: it’s said that iTunes can be a bit difficult to manage when the library’s size gets a big too much, but from what I can tell, it’s not that the app won’t launch or something—I know several people with enormous libraries (40GB+), using iTunes.

    RE: using more than one library. AFAIK, there’s a way to do so, but only if you’re on a Mac—check out Libra.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// September 10th, 2006 at 14:39 PM

  36. THANKS (From chile) it works,

    From a PC to Ibook G4 the to a Ext. HD

    Thanks again

    ...added by Benjamin Rencoret /// October 5th, 2006 at 20:27 PM

  37. Sorry for my stupidity but I don’t manage this.

    This is my “challenge”: My Music is located on a network drive. That’s a problem if I work offline. As iTunes does not offer an option to specify the iTunes Library path.

    This is what I want to do: Install iTunes with the network connected and then migrate the Library (there are no music files yet) to a local drive.

    But that does not work for me. I played around with you article ant tested with some music files. The files are stored correctly on the local hard disk drive but the Library used by iTunes is still on the network drive.

    This is really driving me crazy. The first mission – storing the files locally – is accomplished. But that makes no sense for me as long iTunes uses the XML/ITL from the network.

    Would be great if someone has the same problem and solved it. ;-)

    Peter

    ...added by Peter /// October 24th, 2006 at 14:30 PM

  38. This thread details a very clean way of moving the library without losing metadata. File > Export library, then in the new location, File > Import. Done. :-)

    ...added by eric /// November 1st, 2006 at 03:16 AM

  39. Eric: that’s if you let iTunes manage your music library. This HOWTO is about when you don’t let iTunes manage your music library.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// November 1st, 2006 at 10:17 AM

  40. Thanks for the helpful information. As it turns out this also solves another problem that has been plaguing me. When subscribed to a podcast, if there is an error downloading an episode which subsequently has to be deleted, you can never get it back into the listing of episodes to download. By following the instructions here, not only does it not lose your previously downloaded episodes – it resets your episode listing to allow a re-download. Excellent!

    Thanks again for the concise directions.

    Simon

    ...added by Simon /// November 2nd, 2006 at 02:32 AM

  41. I see that after copying iTunes and my music library to my external drive they’re synchronized automatically. Part of the point of me getting this drive was so I could delete some large movie files off my computer and just access the drive when I wanted to watch them. Do I need to delete iTunes from my internal drive and just hook up the external when I want to watch? Or is there some way to make them so they aren’t in sync so I can delete movies and TV shows from my internal drive yet keep the music on the internal drive, yet have everything on the external? Please help

    ...added by Samantha /// November 4th, 2006 at 09:53 AM

  42. Thank you for the HOWTO, it was exactly what I was looking for. I do, however, have one question which might need to be addressed in your article as well. What will happen if you have iTunes set to automatically sync the library with your iPod? After you moved the location, will iTunes think your iPod is still up-to-date or will it start copying all files to the iPod again? With 40GB it will take a long time…

    ...added by Prodoc /// November 7th, 2006 at 00:02 AM

  43. Also…
    I just noticed there a ‘Previous iTunes Libraries’ folder in the iTunes folder containing a different .itl file again. How big is the chance it will use that file when the main .itl file is corrupted?

    ...added by Prodoc /// November 7th, 2006 at 00:07 AM

  44. I couldn’t wait for an answer ;-)
    Here are some findings using iTunes 7.0.2: – iTunes version 7.0.1 and later has ‘Gapless Playback’ support. When you performed the steps to move your music, all file will be analysed again afterwards. – I’ve got a ‘Recent Changes’ smart playlist which has two rules: ‘Date Added’ and ‘Date Modified’ both set on ‘is in the last 7 days’. The playlist works fine and doesn’t list the complete library. – From What are the iTunes library files? ‘If everything goes fine during your upgrade to the latest version of iTunes, you can delete the older iTunes Library files.’ Just in case iTunes starts using the backup .itl file after the move, you might want to move/delete/rename the ‘Previous iTunes Libraries’ folder. – For some strange reason the new .itl file is about 0.5MB bigger than the old one (5539 audio files in the library). – And here it comes… If you have iTunes set to automatically sync the library with your iPod… ALL audio files will be deleted from your iPod and transferred to it again… :-(

    ...added by Prodoc /// November 7th, 2006 at 14:06 PM

  45. For whatever reason, I tried this with Itunes 7.0.2 on a Mac, and it didn’t work. I was trying to get it to accept files on a newly-installed Maxtor NAS server that I got just for storing music. What did happpen instead is that Itunes ignored the XML file, and just created a new, blank library based on the default directory. The advice contained on this page to backup files is excellent for occurrences like this.

    Pardon a mini-rant, but this is an excellent example of how Apple sometimes tends to treat users like idiots. Itunes works like a charm if you follow standard procedure, but if you want to do something slightly different like storing files on a networked drive—something I imagine many people want to do for perfectly innocent reasons—Itunes will fight you every step of the way.

    ...added by Alex /// November 19th, 2006 at 00:08 AM

  46. Alex: these instructions have been written with iTunes 6 in mind.

    I don’t know how well they apply to iTunes 7.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// November 19th, 2006 at 00:40 AM

  47. I have been wanting to move my music files for a year but couldn’t find instructions for people who didn’t want to let iTunes manage their music. Your instructions worked perfectly with 7.0.2 for Windows. Thanks for the great article!

    ...added by coldtoes /// November 20th, 2006 at 17:34 PM

  48. Thanks, that’s good to know!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// November 20th, 2006 at 18:44 PM

  49. Windows user are lucky I guess. It doesn’t work on the Mac with iTunes 7.0.2.

    Good reason for spring cleaning ehh.. rebuilding my playlists.

    ...added by aToMac /// November 20th, 2006 at 20:50 PM

  50. You are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank you so much for this.

    I’ve always understood this couldn’t be done. But I’ve just bought myself a Mac so I thought I’d search again and hey presto, the Windows to Mac conversion works like a dream. iTunes 7.0.2 on both Windows and Mac.

    I am in your debt !

    ...added by The Beansprout /// November 22nd, 2006 at 23:39 PM

  51. The Beansprout: thank you very much for your kind words, I appreciate them.

    Glad the HOWTO worked out for you!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// November 23rd, 2006 at 00:01 AM

  52. I ended up having to delete my library, and dragging the songs from the new NAS drive location into Itunes. I lost my playlists and ratings, but at least it now works like a charm.

    ... almost. With my really huge song files, the lossless ones, it is occasionally skipping. The smaller MP3s play fine. I’m using a Maxtor NAS drive and an Airport network… is there anything I could do to eliminate this problem?

    ...added by Alex /// November 23rd, 2006 at 05:44 AM

  53. Looked for days for a way to move iTunes library without Consolidation ….and yours is the only POST…Thank You !!!

    ...added by Rich Antczak /// December 4th, 2006 at 23:29 PM

  54. Rich: you’re welcome!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// December 5th, 2006 at 02:42 AM

  55. Ok, trying iTunes, because Quicktime upgrade insisted on loading it. On WinXP Pro. I’ve avoided it like the plague because I refuse to use proprietary DRM formats. But thought I’ll give it a shot with my .mp3s

    I keep a live USB backup drive and everynight I auto sync music, pics, and other important files and directories.

    So iTunes carefully found the duplicate backup drive and added all those files again. So every media file I own is in iTunes twice. Great, no wonder this thing is so popular.

    I’m sure I can blow the duplicate files out of the .xml file, but how do I keep the s/w from reading the backups again? Doesn’t seem to be a preference for identifying/restricting media locations.

    I know I’m almost off topic, but this seems like a knowledgeable thread, can somebody steer me in the right direction or to the appropriate resources?

    thanks brad

    ...added by Additional Question (related) /// December 14th, 2006 at 07:25 AM

  56. Nice explanation.
    I had read about the damaged itl, but couldn’t figure it out. I wanted to preserve the playcount, dateadded, lastplaydate, so that’s how I found this artilcle.

    Anyways, I am going to write a program to sort out my music files by artists/cds and such but I have to move it first.

    I tried these with iTunes 6.x a while ago, and it worked but the dateadded field was reset to that day in all my files. I tried it today with iTunes 7.0.2, and it still resets them. I can’t edit the xml, because it won’t read it again.
    Has anyone found out a way to preserve the dateadded field?

    ...added by elcool /// January 5th, 2007 at 03:01 AM

  57. hi how do u download itunes on my i pod? can u pleez help me

    ...added by alpha /// January 19th, 2007 at 00:39 AM

  58. Thanks a bunch… it took me a while to find this page but theinformation was spot-on!

    Many backups later, I’ve got my DB moved to a different drive and back in order! Thanks a bunch!

    ...added by g /// January 22nd, 2007 at 10:06 AM

  59. Just did this with iTunes 7.0.2 on a Mac and it worked fine, except it still changes all the date-added timestamps. Which basically means that it doesn’t work.

    Losing that bit of metadata isn’t acceptable, and I haven’t been able to find any solution that preserves it. The date-added timestamp is in the XML document, so there’s no reason it couldn’t be kept.

    The only solution I can think of is to use the old library re-locate each missing song file manually. But that’s just not feasible for a library of more than a few albums.

    ...added by Ross Brown /// January 26th, 2007 at 03:20 AM

  60. Ross Brown: When most metadata is preserved and I make sure to note that some attributes (including the “date-added timestamp”) aren’t, how can this “basically mean that it doesn’t work”?

    Have you read the “Update” in Part 2, Step 8?

    This article delivers what it talks about, so I’d say it works.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// January 26th, 2007 at 03:32 AM

  61. Okay, this is crazy. I was annoyed because the technique described above reset all the “Date Added” timestamps and it also lost all the album artwork previously downloaded through iTunes. In search of a new technique, I put my original library file back into place in the iTunes folder on the new volume and opened iTunes.

    When I double clicked a song to to play it, I didn’t get the “can’t find file” error message…it started playing! I did a get info on the file and it showed it located on the new volume. All my “Date Added” timestamps are preserved. All the album artwork is there.

    So I forgive you iTunes 7.0.2. You’ve got some smarts going on. I don’t know how this worked, but I did notice that that my “iTunes Music folder location” had changed in my iTunes preferences. Previously I’d been using a symlink in my home directory’s music folder to get iTunes to look for its files on a network volume, but now its set directly to the path on the firewire volume.

    After quitting iTunes, I opened up the iTunes Music Library.xml file and can see that the location string has been updated for the files I played, while others still show the old location. iTunes is being smart and looking for songs in the new location and updating its references. Awesome. iTunes is being smart!

    So to summarize: – I store my music outside of the iTunes Music folder. – I was storing my music and iTunes library files on a network volume and using a symlink to trick iTunes into thinking it was in my home directory. – I moved all the music files and iTunes directory to an external firewire drive. – After my “iTunes Music folder location” got changed to the location on the new firewire drive, iTunes is automatically looking for my music files, finding them and updating its database without overwriting any of the metadata.

    ...added by Ross Brown /// January 26th, 2007 at 03:57 AM

  62. Sorry for not being clear, Konstantinos. The XML search and replace technique works as described in the article. When I say “it doesn’t work”, I mean it’s not the ideal solution because one important bit of metadata is still lost. If I’m losing some of the metadata, I might as well be losing all of it. I refer to the “Date Added” all the time so I need a solution that preserves that.

    Fortunately, I stumbled onto something that did that unexpectedly. I’m not exactly sure why it worked or if this is a new feature of iTunes 7, but I’ve got all my music on a different volume and the “Date Added” dates are unchanged.

    ...added by Ross Brown /// January 26th, 2007 at 07:41 AM

  63. it worked! thank you very very very much.

    ...added by Christian SJ /// January 30th, 2007 at 20:30 PM

  64. Ross Brown, when moving the files did you preserve the folders in the same way? and where did you leave the .itl and .xml?
    Because I want to reorganize my music too, and if iTunes will look around the folders for the song, then you’ve just solved my problem.
    And if I can change the song’s filename and it will find it too, that will be excelent.

    ...added by elcool /// February 3rd, 2007 at 19:18 PM

  65. Wonderful! It works very well with iTunes 7.0.2. Great. Saved hours of work.

    ...added by Peter /// February 5th, 2007 at 11:49 AM

  66. In need of advice! Given the expertise in this blog, I thought someone might have some great suggestions.
    After buying a G5 iMac, I upgraded our old slot loading CRT G3 iMac to 10.3.9 and gifted it to my 10 year old iPod using daughter. We can’t easily network the older iMac (that’s another story, involving lightning and a fried Ethernet card). The problem is that music purchased through the iTunes Store can’t be played on the G3. I’ve tried importing the files into the G3 iTunes library and playing the songs through the iPod. In each instance, authorization fails because the machine is not networked. Are there any simple work arounds? I’ve also tried burning a CD of purchased songs, and these also required authorization to play. I realize that networking the old iMac using a USB wireless network is one way to go, but this is not an option at the moment.

    ...added by woogs /// February 11th, 2007 at 17:46 PM

  67. I downloaded ITUNES in my work computer. I had folders and songs in it. I moved and i got a new computer. When I installed ITUNES in my new computer and hookup my ipod with it, it says that i will erase all the songs (every thing) from my ipod and i have to start over. I dont wana loose my songs and data from my IPOD is there any way i can upload songs/data without lossing my old one. Please help(step by step will be help full)
    Thanks in advance.

    ...added by imran /// February 12th, 2007 at 23:40 PM

  68. I don’t fully understand- do I do this from the computer I want to move my iTunes to, or from? And how does it exactly make iTunes move onto a computer on the same network?

    ...added by Jay Maison /// February 14th, 2007 at 01:55 AM

  69. beautiful—i’d been looking for this info for weeks—great, and thanks!

    Jay, above—sounds like you want to do automatic iTunes management, and not mess around with XML files.

    ...added by pinky /// February 17th, 2007 at 22:38 PM

  70. what Ross Brown discovered is the following:
    If you move a music file iTunes will notice that an update the path in your library automatically (this is even the case if you move a file to the trash, iTunes will locate it there and still play that track)

    But: unfortenately this only works when you move a file within one volume

    so it doenst work if you move a file from your local harddisk to a network volume or your external harddisk and vice versa

    ...added by Laurens /// February 28th, 2007 at 08:37 AM

  71. For those switching to Mac and wanting to carry their music and library data over, I’d like to know if the following works (i.e. AFAIK nobody’s tested this):

    1. blanking your “iTunes Library” file (on the Mac)
    2. bringing over your “iTunes Music Library.xml” (from the PC) revised with the updated filepaths (for the Mac)

    Worked just fine….. Thanks!!!

    ...added by aiko /// March 2nd, 2007 at 04:31 AM

  72. I needed to update my iTunes file paths following my upgrade to Vista. (Have not seen Apple acknowledge this problem.)

    Your instructions worked perfectly. One month after installing Vista, I’ve got control over iTunes again.

    Thanks!

    ...added by Jonathan /// March 6th, 2007 at 04:58 AM

  73. Hi

    im not sure if this has already been asked but ive got a whole bunch of songs that will play on itunes and then skip halfway through to the next song, but when i play them on windows media player they work fine got any suggestions.thanks alot.

    ...added by Gambit 17 /// March 7th, 2007 at 19:35 PM

  74. Much appreciate the helpful knowledge. Had been trying to Xfer library from old laptop to new one… all other sites leave out the consolidate library ” step… hence I’ve been left w/a massive playlist of my external HD…
    Thanks again!

    ...added by mikalm /// March 8th, 2007 at 11:01 AM

  75. I am trying to move my iTunes from one PC (both WinXP) to another and not lose the library information. Can anyone tell me if the “Part 1” at the beginning of this thread works for iTunes 7.0? I have my iTunes-ripped music and iTunes store music in my My Music/iTunes folder, but most of it is in the root My Music folder. I can consolidate the songs if that’s what I need to do. I think iTunes “manages” my library…I add tag data and so on to the songs in both the My Music/iTunes folder and the My Music folder. I just don’t want to lose the library data that I’ve added in iTunes.

    ...added by KKRip /// March 12th, 2007 at 03:48 AM

  76. iTunes 7.1.0.59 on Windows

    The regeneration works for the Music library.

    Afterwards, it regenerates gapless and normalization (volume) at about 2 songs per second over 100mbit/samba or about 4 seconds per song over excellent signal 802.11g.

    Browser is under “View” rather than “Edit”.

    Podcast does not show up here, so they have to be manually resubscribed.

    I’m assuming Audiobooks would also disappear had there been any.

    ...added by Josh-Daniel S. Davis /// March 16th, 2007 at 06:51 AM

  77. Thanks alot! This was a great help.

    ...added by Anika /// March 17th, 2007 at 05:28 AM

  78. I am also having the problem on my Windows system where the itunes will halt in the middle of particular songs and skip to the next one. Any ideas?

    ...added by Mark /// March 17th, 2007 at 15:38 PM

  79. I think I solved this problem of particular songs “halting” in the middle of a playback. Create a new folder, called somthing very similar to the folder with the offending songs, copy all the first folder’s contents into the new one, go to itunes and delete the current versions of those songs, and recapture those songs into itunes. Worked for me …

    ...added by Mark /// March 17th, 2007 at 16:05 PM

  80. I’m trying to solve this problem with itunes and i’m wondering whether anyone can help – i have tried calling the Apple support phone number but to no avail.

    Most of my songs are located in the itunes folder but some are located in the shared folder (approx 2,000). One day, after playing a song in the morning the same song would not play in the afternoon. An exclamation mark appeared to the left with itunes saying that it was unable to locate song an would i like to manually locate. It transpired that all of the songs on the shared folder were apparently unable to be located. If I manually locate 2,000 songs this would take along time. If i transfer all the songs to itunes folder i lose all data that has been added to the library – most played/playlists etc. – which I really don’t want to happen.

    Is there anyway I can transfer these files & link them up to the library, keeping the itunes data, without doing each song individually? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated….

    ...added by Daniel /// March 28th, 2007 at 20:31 PM

  81. Hey, I have a notebook computer that has a c drive and a d drive.Previously everything has always been stored on my c drive including all my itunes crap. The c drive was pretty full, and my computer crashed, so i had to restore everything on the computer. I’ve been able to transfer my itunes librabry from my ipod to my computer but I am trying to figure out how to transfer all of my itunes stuff to the d drive of the computer instead of the c drive, will this method work for that too without having it automatically copy to the cdrive?

    ...added by Linda /// April 1st, 2007 at 03:00 AM

  82. My old WinXP pc just died last week. I kept all of my audio files on a separate hard drive. I just used this tutorial to add all of my music back to iTunes version 7.1.1.5 on Windows Vista Home Premium. I’m missing the Date Added feature, but I’m very happy to keep my ratings!!!

    ...added by Sean /// April 4th, 2007 at 03:48 AM

  83. I notice there is a Perl module called Mac::iTunes listed in CPAN that can read and write the ITL file. It would be great if someone wiser than me could write a Perl script to edit the ITL file instead of just destroying it, thus preserving all of the metadata.

    ...added by Michael Newton /// April 4th, 2007 at 20:59 PM

  84. I tried doing this for my XP machine and with iTunes 7.1.1.5, and I had no luck. What iTunes did during the adding of the .xml file was completely rebuild the .xml file with the songs that the pathways were not affected by my hard drive crashing (which were only 30 of my thousands of song library). Becuase it rebuilt the library by itself, I no longer have the original .xml file to try again. Any thoughts…

    ...added by John /// April 11th, 2007 at 05:32 AM

  85. Hello,

    Thanks for the detailed advice. I tried it (on a Mac running iTunes 7.1.1), following your instructions to the letter, but when I opened iTunes, while it did recognize that the library was corrupt, it did not rebuild it from the xml file; rather, it simply created a new, blank library. Any advice on forcing it to use the xml file?

    ...added by Brian /// April 13th, 2007 at 04:50 AM

  86. Tried it again using Text Edit instead of Word, and it worked. I think Word was doing some funky kind of automatic formatting to the xml doc when I saved it. Thanks a lot.

    ...added by Brian /// April 13th, 2007 at 05:30 AM

  87. it works! god bless you

    ...added by danesh /// April 13th, 2007 at 08:59 AM

  88. just wanted to say that this method works on osx86 installs too.

    thanks for the steps, you saved me weeks worth of adding ratings to back my music!

    ...added by lord xeon /// April 14th, 2007 at 19:51 PM

  89. THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR THIS
    I thought I had lost years of ratings, playlists, play counts, etc. until I found this fix
    You’re a godsend

    ...added by steve /// April 15th, 2007 at 20:46 PM

  90. Hi,

    I am looking for a similar method to move my entire Windows Media Player library to another hard drive, whilst retaining all the name changes and such that I have made.
    I am looking to format the hdd I am currently using for my music (and only my music) as FAT32 so I can install Ubuntu and mess about with it.
    I would really rather not have to go through all the songs I renamed once upon a time, and rename them again, it took long enough the first time!
    I played around with creating a new playlist with my whole library and editing it, but it only saved the location of the songs, and not any other data.

    If anyone has done this, or knows of a way I would be VERY appreciative :)

    thanks,
    pilch

    oh, and a great article btw, it’s a shame I prefer WMP to iTunes :)

    ...added by pilch /// April 23rd, 2007 at 02:45 AM

  91. hmm, I take back that last post, it seems in my reluctance to commit to transferring my music, I was blissfully unaware of the fact that WMP is rather clever and picks up any changes whilst leaving everything as it was!

    All hail WMP, king of music libraries :D

    In truth, I only prefer it over iTunes because it organises things sensibly, and makes finding things oh-so-easy. version 10, of course, 11 is even worse than iTunes in that respect! :)

    ...added by pilch /// April 23rd, 2007 at 03:05 AM

  92. My xml and itl accidentally got deleted (my iTunes was on a shared computer, hence my desire initially to move it.) The library is intact…is there any way possible to salvage the scenario…perhaps get it off the iPod?

    ...added by Teamm /// April 28th, 2007 at 20:11 PM

  93. You rule, works a treat, thanks you just saved my day!!!

    ...added by JoE /// May 7th, 2007 at 12:29 PM

  94. I have read this guide, but I have been thinking about addressing the problem from a completely different angle. I haven’t tried this, but would appreciate some feedback on whether this would work or not.

    I will eventually get a new computer and some day need to move my itunes library. I also fall into the category of not allowing itunes to manage my music. I have two hard drives and my music is stored on D:

    However, rather than using a text editor to edit the xml file and redirect itunes, my theory is that it would actually be easier to simply move my mp3s to an identically named location on the new computer. eg. old computer d:mp3s—> new computer map new d: and add mp3 folder. this would seem to eliminate the need to edit the xml file and itunes would not have to “find” the files because they are in fact the same location as the original?

    comments and criticisms very welcome

    ...added by Peter /// May 11th, 2007 at 04:14 AM

  95. Peter: after some veeeery quick and superifical thinking, I can’t see why this wouldn’t work.

    Let us know how it goes.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 12th, 2007 at 20:17 PM

  96. Thanks for the great info!

    Just wanted to add my experience to this thread. I just moved my iTunes library from Windows XP to my new MacBook Pro. I followed the suggestions here, but for me at least, it didn’t work. I’m using iTunes 7.1.1 (the latest version as of this writing) and when you wipe out the contents of the itl file, it doesn’t rebuild it, it just creates a new file with empty contents (after prompting you that it is corrupt). So here’s what I did, and it seems to work.

    First, I updated my Windows iTunes installation to the same version as the one on my Mac (7.1.1.). This was to ensure that the file formats would be compatible. I copied all of my music to an external hard drive. I opened the xml file into a text editor and replaced all the paths with the location on the Mac where I planned to store the files. I then copied the modified xml file to the external hard drive as well. Then I brought it over to the Mac, copied the music files to the predetermined folder, and copied the xml file to the ~/Music/iTunes folder (after deleting the existing one). Then I deleted the contents of the iTunes Library file as suggested. At first the automatic rebuild didn’t work because I blanked out the file using TextMate. On a second try, I used plain old TextEdit and that time it worked. It had to restore Gapless Playback Information, but all the files were imported into the library and all play counts and play dates were restored.

    Thanks so much!

    ...added by Matt /// May 12th, 2007 at 23:44 PM

  97. Oops, should’ve edited my comment more clearly before posting… In the first paragraph I state that it didn’t work. What I meant was it didn’t work at first because TextMate wasn’t effective at fully blanking out the file. Using TextEdit it worked just fine.

    ...added by Matt /// May 12th, 2007 at 23:46 PM

  98. Matt: thank you for the detailed wrap-up, appreciated! And glad the HOWTO was helpful!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 13th, 2007 at 05:10 AM

  99. I am trying to do this hack but am running into problems due to the file size. I have 17,000 + songs in my library which weighs in at 99 Gigabytes (not sure that matters). the itunes music Library is 25 MB. I am able to open the XML file in Wordpad and Notepad. However, when I try to do a global search and replace as suggested above, the editor just craps out and crashes. I even went out and bought new RAM and increased my physical RAM from 1 Gig to 3 Gigs—same problem. Is there any way to trick the computer by adding virtual memory so that I avoid the crash? Anyone else run into this? The alternative is cutting and pasting 17,000 times—which given how much time I’ve been struggling with this, I might be finished with by now. Appreciate any suggestions

    ...added by Bruce C /// May 13th, 2007 at 06:21 AM

  100. Bruce: hmm, that’s a bummer. Maybe try a different text editor? EditPad Lite and Notepad2 are two excellent, free text editors.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 13th, 2007 at 18:13 PM

  101. Konstantinos:

    Rock on!!

    Edit Pad Lite did the job in microseconds.

    You might want to include a notation above that if the iTunes library is humongous like mine to go straight to Edit Pad Lite— don’t stop at Notepad or Wordpad. Edit Pad opened the file instantly and did the S&R almost as fast.

    Thank You, Thank You.

    ...added by Bruce C /// May 15th, 2007 at 00:55 AM

  102. Bruce: excellent, nice that it did the job for you.

    Glad I could be of help.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 15th, 2007 at 17:30 PM

  103. My problem is different, I think, than what’s been covered thus far: when I first installed iTunes it scanned my entire computer – that read my backup external drive, too! Therefore, my iTunes library has 2 copies of every music file I have, and I can’t load my iPod. (I have over 2000 music items…)

    I really need some way to purge all records/references in my iTunes library of the “J:” items. Or, lacking that method, I need to reload (rebuild) the iTunes database while I have my external drive (J:) manually turned off. I tried to erase the .itl & .xml files and reinstall iTunes, but that failed to do anything.
    If I could find the record format of the .itl file I could probably write a C/C++ program to purge the J: items, but I’ve been unable to find that information. Even with that, I’d still have an almost impossible issue with the .xml file, since there’s no way I can see to “edit out” the packet references to J: ...
    I’d appreciate any thoughts on what I can do with this problem. TIA

    ...added by Mike Copeland /// May 17th, 2007 at 02:58 AM

  104. Mike: I doubt you’ll be able to discover the record format of the .itl file. Easily, at least.

    When you completely uninstall iTunes (both the app and the library data, etc.) and you re-install it with the external drive off, what you do you get when it scans your computer?

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 18th, 2007 at 00:02 AM

  105. Ohmigoodness!!! I’m so computer dumb I(but I’m blonde so I have a good excuse). I’m very scared to try this as what happens if i muck up and lose all my songs?My itunes has so many songs I’m sure it’s slowing down my PC laptop. Is there any way that I can put all the songs (that are stored on my PC for itunes) onto something that i plug into my laptop when I want to listen to itunes? hmmm did that make sense??

    ...added by Melissa /// May 18th, 2007 at 11:48 AM

  106. Melissa: hmm, I see what you’re saying but it won’t work I think.

    I mean, of course you can move your songs to an external drive without losing all of the metadata, ratings, etc. on iTunes (that’s what this guide is about after all; make sure you backup everything first!).

    But if iTunes is consuming resources from your computer when it’s open due to the library size, it will do regardless of whether the songs are located on the internal drive or on an external one.

    Did that make sense?

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 18th, 2007 at 13:41 PM

  107. I have moved from a Mac to a PC (temporarly…!) and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but after the edited .xml file get’s imported all my files have been converted into radio streams. An example string in the .xml file looks like this now:
    c:/Music/Alben/50%20Cent%20-%20The%20Massacre/50%20Cent%20-%2001%20-%20Intro.mp3
    Is this correct?
    the original looked like this:
    file://localhost/Users/weilandh/Music/Alben/50%20Cent%20-%20The%20Massacre/50%20Cent%20-%2001%20-%20Intro.mp3
    thx for any help!

    ...added by FrequentFlyer /// May 23rd, 2007 at 05:14 AM

  108. FrequentFlyer: you’ve got the Windows file paths wrong. The forward slashes (”/”) should be replaced with backward ones (”\”).

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 23rd, 2007 at 12:07 PM

  109. K – Wouldn’t I have to manually change all subfolders though, because only the mainfolder is consistent in its path(and therefore easy to change with find/replace)
    so (c:music) is clear to me. What about something like (c:musicalbums50 CentMassacre)?
    thx & sorry if this should be an ignorant question

    ...added by FrequentFlyer /// May 24th, 2007 at 18:24 PM

  110. FrequentFlyer: hmm, good point.

    I don’t know how you could work-around that.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// May 24th, 2007 at 20:58 PM

  111. I was wondering if someone can tell me how to make separate folders for separate genre or artist or movies??? i tried so many different ways on ITunes but it wont let me.
    Thanks

    ...added by Nina /// May 27th, 2007 at 04:41 AM

  112. I have done this four times now, both PC to PC and PC to Mac. Seems to have worked pretty much as stated every time. Thank you so much!

    ...added by Carl /// June 4th, 2007 at 03:47 AM

  113. hi, I came back in search of an answer for the DateAdded problem still. I sent an email to Apple about this too.

    Almost 5 months and no answer found for that. I’ll give it a while more, if not I’ll accept the loss. I can’t do what Ross Brown found, since I have music in different hard drives. (The purpose of this is to get them all together in one.)

    Nina, the only way to do separate folders is for you to manage your music, iTunes doesn’t separate it by genre. I think it does by artist/albums, but thats it.

    ...added by elcool /// June 5th, 2007 at 08:03 AM

  114. Nina: if your subfolders keep the same convention in terms of organisation (such using artistalbumtrackname.mp3), then only the main folder’s path needs changing. If you cvhange your subfolder organiastion, then you would be bect off writing a simple program to change the records (trivial if no information is added to teh path which is not already in the libriary, but rather more difficult if you are relying in the ID3 tags in the files).

    Mike Copeland: I don’t know about C(++), but in Java it would be simple to write a program which would use the String.indexOf(String) method on the index to find instances of file://localhost/J:/, then using the same method find the … which immediately precedes the tag and delete all teh data from there to the next tag. this would be inneficent, and take a long time to run for a large file, but could be left to run without supervision

    To get the tracks off of an iPod, I believe that you can import the folder, asking iTunes to manage the files, meaning it will copy the files to the specified location on your HDD. Alternaltively, you could use PodPlayer to extract your entire iPod to any specified location, adn use your own subfolder path created from the tags on teh iPod.

    Personally, I prefer Winamp to manage my media library, because of the intuitve UI, low memory profile, and above all the use of a scratch playlist (which iTunes lacks and WMP handles so badly as to make it worthless), its skinnable nature. For sycnhronisong my iPod with my Libriry, I use vPod, which can be used to add music from anotehr computer to an iPod without needing to synchronise the rest of the library. It is also small enough to store on the iPod, and needs no registry entries

    ...added by |333173|3|_||3 /// June 5th, 2007 at 18:21 PM

  115. Thank everyone, I will try it.

    ...added by Nina /// June 8th, 2007 at 05:46 AM

  116. I did the same thing Part I and Part II till replacing names in iTunes 7. But unfortunately it loses all its music from the new iTunes folder(E:iTunes) . So when I added the ‘Add folder to Library ‘’ and selected ‘E:iTunes’ everything comes into the same settings as before. I don’t have to do the genre thinhs to assign podcasts. But it automagically takes the podcasts to podcasts and music to music, and organised same as before !!!. One thing I had to do is just click subscribe on the subscribe button after each podcast in podcasts menu.

    But unfortunately It didn’t remember the video files which were Music Videos and which were TV Shows. It just took all the video files as Movies. So I had to do the annoying changing Movies to MusicVideos and TV Shows.

    Is there any simple ways to do that ?

    ...added by Jubair /// June 18th, 2007 at 09:43 AM

  117. Just migrated from WinXP to Vista – iTunes 7.2 – this worked perfectly. I had some music in the iTunes library and lots in the “all usersmy music” folders in XP. copied everything over to the new system and then ran a search and replace with EditPad Lite in the xml – just as suggested, inserting the new Vista directories. iTunes actually crashed the system the first time, so I had to re-copy the iTunes library files, and try again. Second time it worked.

    I’ve got about 6,000 tracks and they all appeared perfectly in the library, along with all playlists, etc.

    don’t forget to go to Preferences and click “show” for audiobooks and games (I thought mine hadn’t imported, but I just forgot to set all the options in my newly installed iTunes).

    I had to drag my podcasts folder into iTunes manually, but they all showed up and now I’m re-subscribed, and all is working well.

    Preserved playcounts, ratings, last-played dates, everything.

    Good luck to everyone else!

    ...added by Neil /// June 18th, 2007 at 22:23 PM

  118. Hey there, I have been doing this trick for a couple years and have had a lot of luck, I just however tried to do this with some really bad results and thought maybe someone can point me in the right direction.

    For some reason, when I ready my XML (which is intact) and clear out my itl, then load up itunes, it only grabs about 900 or so of the 3000+ songs in the library? the number of songs it grabs seems to change each time I attempt it.

    I’ve always had stellar results? I dont know what might have changed, other then the version of itunes. Anyone see similar results?

    ...added by paulzy /// June 19th, 2007 at 23:51 PM

  119. Fabulous stuff.

    What if I have 3 separate iTunes libraries that I want to consolidate (one desktop, three separate users, added an external drive)...

    a) move the libraries into one location
    b) append the xml files together
    c) do a find/replace and point to new location?

    Or is this too complicated, worthy of another tutorial?

    ...added by JeffF /// June 26th, 2007 at 23:08 PM

  120. Jeff, hmm, I don’t have an XML file handy but if there’s no “index” in it (an integer number that’s increasing with every entry), maybe you could do it.

    It’s all theoretical though.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// June 27th, 2007 at 00:40 AM

  121. Good point, KC.

    I did a quick podcast download on my itunes, opened up the xml file, and unfortunately it does have some index number:

    Track IDn

    It is this Track ID integer that references that particular track with the Playlist.

    Will play with it a little more…

    ...added by JeffF /// June 27th, 2007 at 01:17 AM

  122. Jeff, if it has an index I’d be very cautious with proceeding. (And I’m doubtful it would work.)

    Back up twice, and keep us updated!

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// June 27th, 2007 at 02:05 AM

  123. Jeff
    You can add all the xml files, be sure to place the tags where they are supposed to be. Then, run some script that changes the index(Track ID) on the xml file, so no files have the same number.

    If you have manual playlists, you need to update the indexes of the music there as well, or you could delete the playlists and rebuild them later within iTunes.

    ...added by elcool /// July 8th, 2007 at 19:19 PM

  124. Itunes disorganized my libary. how do i get it back back to the way it was?? i like it to be in genre then artist only. it made another folder in which what album its in. how do i get it just to be organized in genre then artist only??

    ...added by Itunes disorganized my libary /// July 9th, 2007 at 01:11 AM

  125. well its not the libaray that is disorgainzed. it was the folder inwhich the songs are in. i went to edit then preferences, then to general and check the keep my itune music organized. after that it disorganized it in there. how would i get it back to normal.. with just the genre folder then all the artist in that folder.. instead of artist then album? i have 4000 songs i was doing them manual but then i gave up.

    ...added by Itunes disorganized my libary /// July 9th, 2007 at 01:21 AM

  126. Itunes disorganized my libary: use a proper name, take a minute to write a proper comment (punctuation, etc.) and then you’re welcome to submit it.

    ...added by Konstantinos Christidis /// July 9th, 2007 at 03:15 AM

  127. Thanks author for the helpful information. This is what i was looking for long ago.
    I need to update my (iTunes) file paths following my upgrade to Windows Vista

    ...added by Mike /// July 11th, 2007 at 20:59 PM

  128. I had a completely full ‘C:’ drive and had already tried moving the music files to my external hard drive “E:”. Much to my horror, when I deleted a folder containing just the music files from my ‘C:’ drive, all the music disappeared from my iTunes. I found these helpful instructions, discovered the (still undeleted) iTunes Music folder and the libraries, and moved these over to the E: drive. The &#