Windows7 to Mac music files

January 6, 2011 10:43 AM

How do I get my music files from an external hard drive formatted for my Windows7 PC to another external hard drive to be played through our Mac Book Pro?

Individual file sizes are relatively small, but the entire collection is over 400gb. I tried Google and the Mefi archives and I'm now more confused than ever. It seems fat32 formatting will be involved, but I'm not sure it will work for such a large volume. Please go step by step...I'm an idiot at this.

posted by txmon to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If you have the two computers attached to each other over a network, you could browse to the PC from the Mac Finder and copy the files that way.

With that huge amount of data, I would suggest copying a few folders at a time, rather than the whole shot at once, which would take hours, and there is a small chance of an error, or your mac going to sleep.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 10:53 AM on January 6, 2011

You will need two programs for your mac. The first is MacFUSE, the second is ntfs 3g, both are free. After these are installed, you computer should be able to read anything on your windows formatted hard drive.
posted by chknstrp at 10:58 AM on January 6, 2011

You will need two programs for your mac. The first is MacFUSE, the second is ntfs 3g, both are free. After these are installed, you computer should be able to read anything on your windows formatted hard drive.

Nonsense!

1. Take external drive formatted for windows and plug into mac, which can read it.

2. Take other drive and plug into mac.

3. Drag.

4. Drop.
posted by dougrayrankin at 11:00 AM on January 6, 2011 [2 favorites]

Emphasis on "read" - OS X can read the NTFS file system, but not write to it. So you should be able to copy and paste from one drive to the other, although it's going to take a long time to transfer 400GB. If you want to write to the NTFS-formatted drive, it's worth looking at MacFUSE and ntfs 3G. I use them primarily so I can edit my Boot Camp Windows partition from inside OS X.
posted by DNye at 11:23 AM on January 6, 2011

What dougrankin said, with some caveats:

You've got a Mac Book Pro, so you should be running a system later than OS X 10.4 by default, which means you should have NTFS read support by default. That part's easy.

Now, I think the "drag a few folders over first" thing is an EXCELLENT idea. Even with read support, there are any number of little glitches that could happen, and it's good to know if any size of a transfer is going to work right the first time.

Lastly, make sure that your Mac isn't set to go to sleep (it should be under the Energy Saver settings, unless they changed things AGAIN in the latest OS). Even with decent transfer speeds, you're probably going to be letting it go for a few hours.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 11:29 AM on January 6, 2011

Another caveat or two:

• OS X's native NTFS reading seems to suffer the same problem as NTFS-3G i.e. occasional inexplicable slowdowns on large transfers which can only be fixed by rebooting. (Yes, it happens across all types of physical connection, so it's not just a e.g. USB problem.)
• Non-ASCII character handling - Windows (for the most part) uses CP-1252 (aka Windows-1252), while OS X uses UTF-8 (actually, "canonically-decomposed Unicode, encoded using UTF-8" aka UTF-8-MAC) for filenames. If you have files with non-ASCII characters in their names (e.g. "Björk", though I think that particular example isn't a problem…), you can run into problems ranging from mis-conversion of individual characters to aborted transfers (though the latter does seem to happen much less often with 10.6.x).

So, yes, for both these reason it's definitely worth doing transfers in batches.
posted by Pinback at 6:57 PM on January 6, 2011