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    Moving iTunes to Vista Laptop from External HD

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by ukclaret, Sep 26, 2007.

  1. ukclaret

    ukclaret Notebook Geek

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    Hello

    I have been everywhere looking for an answer to my particular situation. I am hoping someone can help or point me in the right direction.

    I have recently bought a Dell Vostro 1500 running Vista Home Premium. I have another Dell desktop PC running Windows XP Home edition.

    I have iTunes running on my XP machine which I periodically backup to an external hard drive.

    Question is how do I transfer all this too my Vista machine. Can I drag and drop from the external or are the Vista file structures different?

    I have also heard of a Vista bug that causes corruption in the ipod when disconnecting. There is a fix for this but it is not installed and is not an option when I manually search for windows updates. Has this been fixed in a new version of itunes??

    Any help gratefully received

    Thanks
     
  2. Sam

    Sam Notebook Virtuoso

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    You should just be able to connect the external hard drive and drag the music files to iTunes on the Vista machine. Whether or not Vista's file structure is different doesn't really matter, as .MP3 is supported by nearly every OS. I move music between my MacBook and my desktop PC (with a flash drive) just fine.

    And I know iTunes didn't work well when Vista originally came out but I believe Apple's fixed this up already.
     
  3. sasanac

    sasanac Notebook Evangelist

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    just create a folder wherever you want on your vista machine then drop the files in there.. once you've done that run iTunes and in the options (advanced tab) change the iTunes music folder location to where your newly created music folder is. Then... go to the file menu and add folder to library.. browse to your new folder then click ok. This will then take a while as it is creating you a new library index file. Once it's done, you're done!

    I don't think I've missed anything, there may be other ways of doing it but that's how I've always done it, from XP to 2000 (and vice-versa), XP to XP, XP to Vista HP x64 and Vista HP x64 to MacBook.
     
  4. NinjaNoodles

    NinjaNoodles Notebook Evangelist

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    When I moved my music I copied the XML file and deleted the new ITL file to confuse iTunes and keep my play counts. ;)
     
  5. ukclaret

    ukclaret Notebook Geek

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    Thanks for all your help everyone!

    I will probably just drag and drop my itunes folder into Vista. Hopefully this will keep all my playlists etc intact also.

    Cheers
     
  6. sasanac

    sasanac Notebook Evangelist

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    I think you'll need to export your playlists from the other machine, stick them in your music folder then import them after you've done the "add folder to library" part.