BleepnGames Development Blog

Now that I’m connecting my iPhone to the Mac all the time for use during game development, I figured it was time to move my iTunes library over to the Mac so I don’t have to do my music, video, app synching on a different machine than my dev platform.

I checked out a bunch of blog posts that explain how to make the transition but many were out of date with the current iTunes software and most of them were concerned with keeping playcounts and stuff like that intact. I only care about keeping: music tracks, iPhone apps, podcasts, and my playlists. I thought for sure at the very least I’d have to remake my playlists, but turns out that iTunes had me covered!

Here’s what I did:

1. Update the iTunes software on both the Win and Mac to make sure they’re both running the same version. This may not be necessary, but better safe than sorry.

2. Update all of your apps in iTunes, get the latest podcasts, and basically just make sure everything on the Windows machine is current.

3. Synch the iPhone one last time on the Windows machine to make sure all apps and everything is up to date on both the computer and iPhone. This may not be necessary since when you synch on the Mac it’ll nuke everything on the iPhone anyway, but I just wanted to be safe.

4. Copy the contents of your My Music folder onto a portable hard drive.

Some of the blogs I read suggested consolidating the library so everything is in the iTunes folder, but I like to organize my files into my own folders so I didn’t consolidate.

5. Connect the portable hard drive to your Mac and launch iTunes.

6. Drag and drop all the folders from the music folder on the hard drive directly on to the iTunes window. I suggest only dragging a few folders at a time to keep from bogging down your computer and/or freaking out iTunes.

iTunes will automatically copy all of the files from the portable drive into your music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder on your Mac’s hard drive.  It even kept all of my folders organized just like I had them on my PC.

Note when copying the iTunes folder from the portable hard drive, I went into that folder and then drag and dropped the subdirectories into iTunes rather than dragging the root folder. I don’t know if this makes a difference, but it felt like the right way to go.

When you’re all done you should see everything that was on your Windows machine in iTunes including your Music, Videos, Applications, and Podcasts.  The one thing you won’t see yet are your playlists. I tried dragging the iTunes Music Library.xml onto the iTunes window but that didn’t import it.

7.  Import your Playlist by going to File –> Library –> Import Playlist… and then browse to the iTunes Music Library.xml file on your portable hard drive (eg. /volumes/WD Passport/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml.

iTunes will automatically fix the paths and all of your playlists should appear populated just like they were on your Windows machine.  Awesome!

8.  Now it’s time to synch your iPhone to the iTunes library on your Mac (bye bye Windows!).  Start iTunes (if it’s not running already) and plug in your iPhone.  After a few seconds the iPhone should show up in the sidebar just like normal.  Now if you click “Synch” on the Summary tab, nothing will happen (didn’t for me at least).

You need to go thru the tabs and check the stuff you want to synch: Ringtones, Music, Podcasts, Video, Applications.  I left Photos unchecked since I do my photo synching with iPhoto.

Once you’ve checked all the stuff you want to Synch, hit the Apply (or Synch) button.  Next you’ll get a warning telling you that your iPhone can only be synched with 1 computer and that everything on the phone will be deleted and replaced with this iTunes library.  Since you copied everything from your Windows machine onto the Mac, everything should be exactly the same after the synch — the only difference being you now synch to your Mac instead of your PC.