Libraries, Playlists, Ratings... Oh My, iTunes!

April 2, 2008 4:13 PM

I have a very confusing iTunes problem, regarding transferring songs to an external hard drive, and maintaining playlists and ratings... hopefully it will not be confusing to any of you, brave MeFites!

I have a huge iTunes library on my laptop's hard drive. I have an external drive, fresh from the box, ready to carry these files...

However! I only want a particular set of songs transferred over, and the other songs, I wish to remain on my hard drive. I thought I could simply create a playlist in iTunes of the desired tracks, then select-all, and drag-and-drop those suckers on to the external drive. Alas, no.

Some Google-ing confirmed that the most common way to transfer files from iTunes to an external drive would be to just open Finder windows, and drag-and-drop the folders, forgoing the iTunes program completely. However, using this method means I transfer songs I don't want transferred... so (sigh) here are my questions:

• Is there a better method to transfer over just the songs I want? There are over 3,000 songs I want, currently in a playlist. I tried digging in the iTunes library folders and dragging-and-dropping the songs I wanted, but I made it to the "B" artists before I realized this was insane.

• Can I transfer just an iTunes playlist? I have some playlists in iTunes that are nested. Will they still nested? That sure would be nice!

• How about ratings? I'd love to keep those as well...

• And even more fun, when I have new songs on my laptop that I want to dump on to the external, what would be the best method of keeping that straight? My first plan was to just keep a playlist of songs I want to add, but... well, you can see where that thinking has lead me!

posted by polyester.lumberjack to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Do you have any scripting chops? If so, you could export the playlist to an m3u file (basically just a big list of songs/locations), then use a little shell or perl script to copy them all over to the appropriate place. You could also write a little script that went into your iTunes Library xml file and changed just the paths for those songs, so that the ratings would all be maintained.

I don't have the time to code something up right now, but a competent coder could do it in a half hour or so, I imagine. Got a friend you could buy a six-pack for?
posted by chrisamiller at 4:46 PM on April 2, 2008

Here's a previous question of mine you might find informative.
posted by Effigy2000 at 4:55 PM on April 2, 2008

Mac or Windows? On my Mac, I was just able to select songs from a playlist and drag them to a different drive. They copied fine. Or is the problem that you also want them deleted from the original drive?
posted by thinman at 4:58 PM on April 2, 2008

Apologies... maintaining ratings and whatnot is part of what you want to do. Copying doesn't do that. My bad.
posted by thinman at 5:01 PM on April 2, 2008

If you have an iPod, you can do what I did a few months back with my new computer and use this shareware program called Tansee iPod Transfer. It'll scan your iPod and display a list of all the songs and playlists on it. You can then choose what you want to copy over to your computer, and it will do so -- ratings, playcounts, and all.

I can't for the life of me recall what the limitations on the trial version were, and their site doesn't make that clear. If it does limit you to a certain number of songs, the full version is only $19.95, and if you don't want to spring for it I'm sure there are plenty of cracked versions out on the torrents.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:35 PM on April 2, 2008

I'd recommend PodWorks which allows you to move all metadata, playlists, what have you and also has some nifty features like dupe prevention that you might appreciate more later. It's $8.
posted by cali at 12:54 AM on April 3, 2008

I recommend using two separate itunes libraries: one for the songs on your laptop, and one for songs on your external drive (you could duplicate the laptop songs on the external drive, too, so that one of your libraries is 'complete').

[To quickly create a new library, hold SHIFT key (Windows) or Command (Mac) while itunes is starting. You will be prompted to pick a library to use, or to create a new one.]

So. First, copy all the songs to the external drive. Then, from within itunes, change the location of your music library to the external drive. This will be your 'external drive' library. itunes will update the path information in its database. Then, select the playlist of songs that you want to keep on your laptop. Choose 'export' to export the playlist. Close itunes.

Open itunes again, with the 'switch libraries' key held down. Create a new library - this will be the laptop-only library. It will open up empty. In the preferences, set the location of your library to some place on the laptop. Then, import the playlist that you exported above. This should copy all the songs in the playlist back off the external drive to your new library location on your laptop, preserving all the metadata.

From that point on, just choose the library you want to use at itunes start up, depending on whether or not your external drive is connected.
posted by alb at 7:40 AM on April 3, 2008 [1 favorite]

alb, that system worked beautifully, and it kept all the playlists and ratings in tact! Phew! I am in your debt!

Thank you to everyone for the suggestions!
posted by polyester.lumberjack at 1:50 PM on April 5, 2008