I purchased a new computer last week. I have a couple of servers, a half dozen PCs, and several laptops in my home. I work from a home office so this makes sense. I used to replenish these computers annually but it gets to be too time consuming and too expensive, but I do eventually replace them. The challenge with replacing development workstations is that a lot of software and patches have to be installed and this takes time. Consequently I have no patience for software that doesn’t make it easy for me to swap out hardware.
An example of a challenge I experienced is swapping CPUs but maintaining existing burned Cd's on iTunes. Currently I have about 3500 songs on an external My Book USB hard drive. No sane person wants to burn CDs over--or re-import libraries--we just want to point the software at the folder containing the data and go. This is true for any application. There are a lot of blogs, articles, and posts out there about how to “use an external hard drive with iTunes” because your hard drive fills up or to make your library more portable or whatever. Unfortunately each post seems to fall just a bit short of an accurate solution. So one of the things I do is when I have a computer problem I write down the solution and post it on the Web so if I ever need it again I can find it. (Documenting tricks, tips, and techniques is part of my day job at Developer Express too.) To that end I have documented the steps that work well for me when using existing burned songs for a new PC.
If you want to move iTunes music files to a location other than the default location—for example, because your hard drive fills up or you are upgrading hardware—then try these steps (for Windows):
- Open iTunes
- Select Edit|Preferences and change to the Advanced tab
- Next to the iTunes Music folder location click the Change button; navigate to the new desired location and change the path
- Close the iTunes preferences dialog by clicking OK. This steps modifies a file named “iTunes Music Library.xml”, modifying the path information for elements in your iTunes library
- Close iTunes
- Using Windows Explorer copy just the files in the “iTunes Music” folder to the location you specified in step 3—the new location. (iTunes Music is usually accessible in user:Music:iTunes)
- Delete the files in the “iTunes Music” folder once they have been copied to the new location
- Return to the user:Music:iTunes folder and locate “iTunes Library.itl” and “iTunes Music Library.xml” and make a copy of them. (The “iTunes Library.itl” is a binary version of the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file.) iTunes reads iTunes Library.itl not the .xml file; unfortunately it appears that Edit|Preferences updates the .xml file leaving the file-move somewhat wanting
- Next, open the .itl file in Notepad. (If its a big file Notepad might get sluggish.)
- Select all of the contents of the .itl file (Ctrl+A) and delete them
- Select File|Save As and save the filename as iTunes Library.itl, the file type as All files (*.*), and the encoding as Unicode.
The last step is the one that many of the blog posts have left off, but seems to be the critical step. When you are finished with the steps above re-open iTunes and you should be off to the races.
Why did I write about this subject? Besides having told you the World Wide Web is part of an extension of my memory, and besides the fact that iTunes can be challenging in the aforementioned regard and should be made easier, I wanted to illustrate a point. The point is that as conscientious as we at Developer Express try to be sometimes we don’t know some thing is wrong until we have to share your pain or you tell us. We are working diligently to make more great products and make the ones we have better, but sometimes you experience pain in a way that we haven’t. I encourage you to share your thoughts—share your pain—and we’ll try to make it go away.