Transfer: PC to Mac

August 18, 2005 4:56 PM

How do I transfer songs from a PC to a Mac?

I have a desktop PC which holds my iTunes, where I have about three thousand songs, this is where I have my iPod hooked up to as well. I'm buying a new iBook from Apple. How can I transfer my songs from one to the other?

posted by benkolb to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Best bet would be to format your iPod on the Windows machine first, set it up for disk access and allocate the entire thing as a regular removeable disk. Drag all your MP3 files directly to the iPod from within Windows Explorer. Then, hook the drive up to your Mac and drag them from the iPod into wherever you plan on having them end up.

If you intend on using iTunes to manage your music, then just drag the files from the iPod into iTunes, which, by default, will copy all the files to its own folder on the hard disk at the same time as it imports them.

Once you're done, re-format the iPod on Windows and use it normally.
posted by odinsdream at 5:00 PM on August 18, 2005

Easyish way if you set up a local network: share the iTunes/Win library, install Blue Coconut on the iBook and copy across the contents (or just the songs you want on your laptop).

How are you wanting to manage things in future? Having an iPod means you may need to make a choice about having a 'master' library on one or the other, and have the iPod formatted appropriately.
posted by holgate at 5:13 PM on August 18, 2005

I'm in this exact scenario (except it's a PowerBook in my case). Here's my plan: Within a local network, install an ftp server on the PC (FileZilla Server), then download the files with an ftp client (Transmit) on the Mac. Just make sure that you're not doing this over WiFi or it'll take forever ;).

(FWIW, FileZilla is free, but Transmit is not. If you need a free Mac ftp client, perhaps try RBrowser Lite.)
posted by Alex Handcoding at 5:24 PM on August 18, 2005

ourTunes + iTunes worked fine for me
posted by petah at 5:26 PM on August 18, 2005

I want to have the iBook be the 'master' computer for the iPod.
posted by benkolb at 5:44 PM on August 18, 2005

I put together a list of resources in this livejournal entry to the iPod community. It might be worth a look.
posted by bwilms at 5:54 PM on August 18, 2005

I had this exact problem last year. I didn't feel like doing any research, so I registered another AIM account and did a massive file transfer. It took about 30 hours (and it would require a router or a network of some kind), but it worked.
posted by danb at 8:35 PM on August 18, 2005

I can't believe that no one has just recommended networking the two computers together (all you need is a plain 'ol ethernet cable at the very least) and just dragging-and-dropping the files in Finder. Once you've gotten all the files onto your iBook, just have iTunes build your library.

See here: Sharing files between a Windows XP PC and a Mac running OS 10.3 or greater
posted by moxyberry at 7:20 AM on August 19, 2005

Yeah, really. What's with the convoluted FTP or iPod-dependent solutions here? Network the machines, open up your PC's itunes library from your mac, copy the mp3 files over, and then drop them into itunes on the Mac. I do this all the time, and it works fine; are you guys tripping over some sort of DRM that I've somehow escaped without noticing?
posted by ook at 3:06 PM on August 19, 2005

Here's what worked great for me last night on my new iMac:

I have an MS Small Biz Server that has all my songs in a shared directory so that all my computers can access them over the network. I just have the iTunes Music Folder on my HP laptop set as that shared folder, works great!

The iMac is on my network and also can see that shared media drive, but I wanted to physically transfer my music to the iMac for better performance. First, I copied all the music to the default iTunes music folder on the iMac...just a straight file copy from the server to the Mac.

Then I located the iTunes Music Library XML files on the Mac(there are 2 of them in the same folder) and renamed them filename_orig.xxx so that I could get back to them if necessary.

Then I found the same two files on the HP laptop (located in Docs & Seetings>Username>My Docs>My Music>iTunes>...), and copied those two iTunes Library files to the location on the Mac where they should reside.

Open iTunes on the Mac, and viola! It sees the music in the folder and retains all the song info (ratings, etc). I connected my iPod and it didn't even need to completely resync, just transferred about 20 new songs.
posted by Chuck Cheeze at 10:59 AM on February 1, 2006