When I first got my MacBook Pro, I was a little flummoxed. How was my 85GB iTunes library going to work with my 80GB hard drive? So I got a 250GB USB drive, connected it to the XP machine, and siphoned off the whole library. I used a grep tool to find and replace all instances of “C:\Documents and Settings\Dan\My Music\iTunes Music” with “MYNEWUSBDRIVE::iTunes”, and when I got everything back together, it all worked nice and peachy.
I decided, though, that USB was too slow (I was using a hub), and then determined that I just didn’t like being tethered to an external drive whenever iTunes was open. I went through the same process (including grepping and finding and replacing) and restored my library to the hard drive of the XP machine. (This has advantages: the XP machine is on all day and connected, so it can grab podcasts. Any downloaded music pretty much comes through the XP machine anyway, and the power on the USB ports seems more reliable. If you’ve even closed the lid on a MacBook while an iPod was syncing or charging - heck, if you’ve ever gone to the Apple store and seen the majority of the iPods trying to shake themselves out of a “Do not disconnect” loop, you know what I mean.)
Of course, now the library is bigger, I depend and rely on my Mac more and more, they sell movies in the store, and there’s just no way that a MacBook drive could ever keep up with it. But, all about the convenience as I am, I figured the XP machine was just becoming the main fileserver of a home network - I’d pull MP3s wirelessly off the network like the cool kids do.
That meant sharing my MP3 folder across the network, but that’s something I already do. It also meant grepping through that stupid file again, right?
Turns out not so much. If you take an iTunes library file (it’s the one called “iTunes Library”, or, on a PC, “iTunes Library.itl”), and you move it to a new machine, it’ll complain that it can’t find any files. But if you go into “iTunes music folder location” and give it the name of the folder where it can find those MP3s, it’ll suddenly fly straight, apparently running that find and replace automatically. It said “updating library” for about 20 minutes over the wireless connection, but it worked, and less than 15 minutes later I was cursing myself - first, for waiting so long, and second, for thinking that I could keep an active connection leeching 320kpbs MP3s over a wireless connection that’s also trying to keep the phone line and everyone else’s internet afloat.
You might say that iTunes has a perfectly good “share playlists over the network” feature, but it doesn’t let me edit, modify, or even rate songs in the library. (It doesn’t bump the play counts - but that’s just a pet peeve.) You can look up people who’ve tried to throw their libraries on networks, or even Amazon’s S3, but I think the iTunes part of the digital hub works best when everything is tied down, or when the wireless machines are truly acting as satellites and not pretending they’re in constant contact with the base.
So the whole thing bombed out, but since I hadn’t actually changed any files, I just closed down iTunes on the Mac here and started it back up on the XP machine. As I said, it’s probably better that way.
