Getting my music somewhere usable

January 28, 2016 4:35 PM

I have a Mac-formatted external hard drive full of music, and no Mac to use it with. How do I get the stuff on it somewhere usable?

I had an iMac for years, but it died a year ago and we're a Windows household now, for many reasons. I can't use Google Play music because I have too much music (just shy of 1TB, far more than GPM's 25K song limit), but I do have my music backed up to the cloud. I want to set up a Plex server (or something similar, I'm open to alternatives), and I have a spare Windows machine ready to go for that purpose.

Is what I want to do as simple as

1. Making sure 100% of that 1TB of music is in the cloud by running one last backup
2. Formatting the Mac-formatted HD to Windows file format
3. Downloading the music from the cloud to the HD

That just seems too easy, and like I'm missing something. Am I?

posted by pdb to Technology (4 answers total)

Downloading 1TB would take a long time and if you botch the cloud upload, the music will be gone. I suggest you install an HFS+ driver so you can read the Mac drive and copy it over to another drive. Paragon has a free 10 day trial of their driver.
posted by bluecore at 4:44 PM on January 28, 2016

Seconding bluecore. Hard drive space currently costs under $30/TB. Just do your drive format conversion locally and end up with a bonus backup as well.
posted by flabdablet at 5:49 PM on January 28, 2016

Also, I believe GPM's limit is now 50,000 songs.
posted by salmacis at 3:06 AM on January 29, 2016

An alternative to getting the Windows HFS+ driver would be to get a bootable Linux cd/dvd, e.g. Knoppix. It will likely read/write from all the relevant filesystems out of the box. Agreed with bluecore that it'll be much easier and faster to copy everything locally.
posted by equalpants at 9:58 PM on January 29, 2016