I finally bit the proverbial bullet and bought a new machine (Dell 8940, Win11 Pro), but now have a question about how to handle iTunes.
On the old PC, I kept a data drive for music, podcasts, etc. iTunes pointed to that drive and I set up the preferences (forget how) so that I (not iTunes) organized everything.
I’ve now transplanted that data drive into my new machine and installed iTunes. Now it’s time to marry the two and I’d like to do this as painlessly as possible (while still keeping everything on that data drive). Also - just in case this is important - iTunes was set up so that I organized everything.
What would be the best approach? As nearly as I can tell, the only option seems to be “Add Folder to Library” and rebuild everything pretty much from scratch but it seems there should be an easier way.
No experience with iTunes specifically but I’ve moved a lot of software…
Bring up the OLD machine, go into iTunes, see if there’s a way to export the settings. If so, do so, copy that file to the new machne, go into iTunes, and look in pretty much the same place for how to import the settings.
NOT guaranteed to work, because I don’t know if iTunes has that specific capability. Lots of software does, but not all software.
There are lots of instructions about migrating iTunes files from one machine to another, but they mostly seemed to consist of “how to” instructions on moving media files as opposed to transitioning the iTunes database itself. The iTunes database contains things like whether a particular recording should be included in shuffling, what the equalizer settings should be (e.g., “Spoken Word”), etc. I failed to find an answer anywhere so I just restarted from scratch. It works, but a waste of time.
I’ve begun experimenting with PLEX as an alternative.