How Do You Move an iTunes Library from Windows to Mac?

This is a question I get every now and then, and I finally decided to look into it. As I outline in my latest Macworld article, it’s actually quite simple. This wasn’t the case in the past, as you can see by googling for this subject. You’ll find articles about doing find/replace operations in an XML file to make the move work. I tried it out with the latest version of iTunes, and it’s pretty much transparent.

iTunes Store Spelling Fail

It’s not often that you see mistakes in spelling on the iTunes Store; quality control there is generally up to par. But it’s pretty embarrassing when you spell someone’s name wrong, and do it in a big graphic. Here’s a screen shot from the rotating graphics at the top of the window in the Jazz section:

The correct spelling is “Konitz”, as you see when you click on the graphic and go to the album’s page.

No big deal, but it struck my eye, being familiar with the artist. I’m sure the iTunes Store will fix this soon.

Update: just for the heck of it, I looked up the record label and sent them an e-mail. They don’t seem to care either.

How Long Does It Take to Fill an iPod?

Have you ever timed it? I just got a new iPod classic, with a capacity of 160 GB, to replace the one I broke the other day. I can fill the iPod’s capacity (which is actually 148.87 GB) easily, as my music library – not counting podcasts and audiobooks – is currently just shy of 300 GB.

I had never timed how long it took with my previous classic, but this one does seem to copy just a bit faster; maybe the hard disk is slightly more rapid than the older one (it was a two-year-old model). So to give you an idea how long it takes to fill that much space, here are two numbers. First, in two hours, I was able to copy about 112 GB of data to the device; that’s .93 GB per minute. To fill the iPod entirely (a tad less, actually, because I didn’t fill it to the brim; I left about 6 GB of free space), it took about 2 hours and 45 minutes, or about .86 GB per minute. So it seems to get slower as it goes along.

I tried with my 16 GB nano to see how fast that was. I had always had the impression that it copied faster than the hard-drive-based classic, but it turns out that I was wrong, and it just seemed faster because it holds – and copies – so much less. In my unscientific (ie, not timed with a stopwatch) test, the iPod nano copied about .6 GB per minute.

My 1st generation iPod touch is a different animal altogether. First, to simply delete files takes a long time; I finally force quit iTunes after 11 minutes, because it was beachballing. When I restarted, the music had been deleted, however, so there’s probably something that got borked along the way. Copying files to the iPod touch was very slow: after 15 minutes, it had copied a mere 2.7 GB, or roughly .18 GB per minute. It took 2 hours and 10 minutes to copy 13 GB of files. (Could any readers with more recent iPod touches comment as to whether they have similar copy times? Because this means that a 64 GB iPod touch would take about 9 hours (!!!) to fill.)

So when you get a new iPod and fill it, you may find that it takes a while. These numbers will give you a better idea how long you have to wait to get all your music on the iPod.

Update: December 1, I have received a new 32 GB iPod touch. I decided to buy it in part because mine was old (and there are features on the new one I don’t have), and was also suckered by Apple’s black Friday discount. In any case, the copy speed is impressive. In the first minute, it copied about 800 MB of music; faster than the nano, but still slower than the classic. It took 14 minutes to copy a total of 11.4 GB of music files, so that’s roughly .81 GB per minute, a respectable speed. I must therefore assume that either my original iPod touch was very slow, or that there was a problem with it.

I Broke My iPod

In all these years, I’ve never broken an iPod. I’m generally very careful with them, and since I don’t commute to work (I work out of a home office) I don’t carry them around with me much. In fact, I use my main iPod more as a source for my stereo than anything else.

Well, last night, taking my iPod from its dock connected to my stereo to the other side of my office to sync it with my Mac, I slipped, and I dropped the iPod flat on the floor. It did a belly-flop on the wood parquet, and, while there was no visible damage, when I picked it up I could hear a lot of clicking from the hard disk. I moved around the menus, and it was working, but still clicking a lot every time I selected a track. So I restored the iPod, and started recopying all my music to it. It’s a 160 GB model, so that takes quite a while, and I wasn’t able to finish it last night. First thing this morning, I connected it to my Mac, and it started copying again, but it got to a certain point then started copying very slowly, then finally wouldn’t copy any more, making iTunes beachball. Eventually, I got an error message, saying, “Attempting to copy to the disk “Dark Star” failed. The disk could not be read from or written to.”

It looks like it’s over for this one, the first I’ve lost to damage rather than old age. I guess I’ll be getting a new 160 GB iPod in black, since my current one is/was silver. Interestingly, Amazon France (my local Amazon) has iPod classics at about EUR 50 off the regular price of EUR 259: it says they are third generation, but that’s obviously an error, given the product model number, and the graphics. (And anyway, if they were that old, they wouldn’t be 160 GB.)

It’s a shame to lose an iPod. If a replacement hard disk were available here at a reasonable price, I might go that route (that’s what I suggested in my article What to Do with a Dead iPod), but they’re pretty expensive, at least around EUR 150, whereas a new iPod is only EUR 209 from Amazon. Oh well. I’ll try and be more careful next time.

Save Tracks from the New iTunes Store in Playlists

I’ve long used the iTunes Store to tag my classical music after ripping, if the information from the Gracenote database was insufficient (which is often the case). I wrote about how to do this in this Macworld article from last year. This involves saving the tracks to a playlist, then using an AppleScript to copy information from the tracks.

But with iTunes 9, the iTunes Store layout is different, and you can’t copy tracks to a playlist to do the above trickery. Well, it turns out there is a way, and it took AppleScript maven Doug Adams to figure it out. I e-mailed Doug, and, after scratching his head for a while, he came up with the trick: copy the tracks when in iTunes Store Browse mode. While this means that you need to know the artist name – which, for classical music, can depend on a number of elements – you can still use the AppleScript I mentioned in the article for tagging. If you don’t know how the artist is listed in the iTunes Store, look it up first in the Store, then switch to Browse mode (press Command-B to do this), then drill down until you find it.

I’ve used this trick for tagging, but, as Doug mentions, you can also use it to save tracks to a playlist to use as a kind of wishlist.

iTunes 9: Home Sharing FTW!

Apple has added a powerful feature to iTunes 9: Home Sharing. It’s all about resolving the many problems inherent in using iTunes to purchase music, movies and iPhone apps, as well as ripping CDs. In any home, more than one person is likely to want to listen to the same music. When I rip a CD that I like, others in my household – my wife and son – may want the same music on their Macs to put on their iPods. Before, I’d have to send the music over the network, and they’d have to add it to their library. It was doable, but it was a hassle.

Enter Home Sharing. Just turn the feature on (Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing), enter your iTunes account info (you need an iTunes Store account to do this, even if you only want to share content that you’ve ripped from your own CDs, and all the computers need to use the same iTunes account), then click Create Home Share. After you’ve done this on all your Macs, you’ll see them show up in the Shared section of iTunes sidebar. You can, of course, listen to music from a shared library as before, but you can also select tracks in the library, then click the Import button at the bottom right of the iTunes window to have those items copied to your library. You can do this with movies and music files, as well as radio station links, but not with audibooks from Audible or QuickTime sound files.

But it gets even better when you decide to automate the process. Click the Settings button and you’ll see a dialog which lets you choose to automatically transfer new purchases for different types of media.

However, this only works with media or apps purchased from iTunes; this doesn’t effect CDs you rip yourself. To find the latest additions on each library, just use the built-in Recently Added smart playlist, and select the new tracks you want to copy.

The best thing about this is how easy it is to copy from one library to another. No more do you need to put files into drop boxes and manually add them to an iTunes library. iTunes handles everything. This is so simple that it’s foolproof, but it makes me wonder why Apple couldn’t have come up with it sooner.

I Don’t Want to Buy a New iPod

And I haven’t bought a new one now for, let’s see, a couple of years. The last one I bought was a 160 GB classic; back when there were two sizes (80 GB and 160 GB), the year before the classic got downgraded to 120 GB. I’ve got a nano, bought around the same time, a shuffle – the good one, with buttons – and a 1st generation iPod touch. But I don’t want a new one.

You have to understand, the main reason I have all those iPods is for my work: I write about the iPod, so I need to have the different models to explore their interfaces and understand their features. But after Apple’s presentation yesterday, there’s nothing enticing about the new models – or the revisions of old models, to be more correct.

I was actually hoping for something new, to feed my tech lust. I wanted a tablet, an e-book reader, or something different to be able to play with. But, no, Apple has let me down, and I won’t be buying a new iPod for a while. Most likely, given the way they release new iPods, until this time next year.

iTunes 9: A Quick Look at Some Small Changes

iTunes 9 sports a refreshed interface, but the majority of its features are similar to the way they were before. I’m going to write about some of the more interesting features – especially Home Sharing – after I’ve had time to test them completely, but here’s a quick overview of some of the small changes that may actually be important to the way you use the program.

• The Mini Player: iTunes lets you “shrink” its window to display a mini-player to control the program while you’re listening to music. Everyone was used to clicking the green jelly-bean in the top left corner of the iTunes window to change the window size, but this was actually an interface aberration. Apple has corrected this, so the green button does what it should: it expands or contracts the window, but doesn’t change the display in the window. Now, you need to choose View > Switch to Mini Player, or press Command-Shift-M. (I just found out, a couple of hours after publishing this, that you can hold down the Option key and click the green button to get the previous behavior.)
• The browser: iTunes has long had a browser that displayed in two or three columns above your music. Apple has made some additions to this browser in iTunes 9. You can have additional columns display; I’m very happy to see this, because it means that I can display a Composer column. In addition, you can display the browser to the left of your music, in slim, tall columns. (Personally, I don’t like this position, and not all the columns, such as Composer, display at the left.) Choose View > Column Browser to make these adjustments.
• The iTunes Media folder: iTunes used to have an “iTunes Music” folder, but Apple has changed the name to reflect the types of content you have; it’s not the “iTunes Media” folder. You’ll only see this new name if you create a new library, or if you’re using iTunes for the first time. You don’t need to worry about changing the name of your folder; any name is fine, actually.

I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on Home Sharing – what I think is the best new feature to be added to iTunes in years. It allows you to easily transfer music from one iTunes library to another over your network (within a local network; it’s mainly for people sharing music at home, as its name suggests).