Help me move just the songs I want

December 31, 2006 12:28 AM

How do I move only songs from a certain playlist from my external hard drive to my computer? The easy way, please.

I want to move about 3000 songs from my external hard drive to my computer. I use itunes and my itunes music folder is located on the external because it won't all fit on my computer's hard drive. Is there a simple way to move just that playlist of 3000 songs, other than manually copying every song file over? Please tell me there is. This seemed like a great idea in theory, and then I got to the execution part and now I want to execute myself! Help, please.

posted by evilbeck to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Extremely easy with iTunes. Just highlight the tracks in iTunes and drag them to the target folder in Windows Explorer.
posted by roomwithaview at 12:33 AM on December 31, 2006

Or just drag-and-drop the playlist itself from the sidebar to where you want it to go.
posted by bitpart at 1:28 AM on December 31, 2006

Holy cow, I really am an idiot! Thanks so much! Unfortunately immediately after I posted this, I managed to accidentally delete a good chunk of songs from my external hard drive and spent the last hour trying to recover them, unsuccessfully using terminal. I'm normally not this incompetent when it comes to computers, honestly. This is just not my night.
posted by evilbeck at 2:41 AM on December 31, 2006

You've already highlighted the answer, so you may never read this, but, at least in the OS X Finder, if you drag and drop from iTunes two tracks with the exact same file name, the drag and drop won't happen. There's no explanation; it just starts to do the drag and drop, then undoes it. If you isolate the identically named track and change its name (or move it to a separate directory), everything's cool.
posted by kimota at 8:34 AM on December 31, 2006