New Mac: Best Way To Transfer Music Files Stored On External Drive?

Mojo1 said:

My iTunes library file resides on the iMac's internal drive but the music files live on a FW800 external. The iMac is running Snow Leopard; the new Mac Mini runs Mountain Lion. I am running the same version of iTunes on both Macs.

Is it possible to simply transfer the iTunes folder from the iMac to the Mini (replacing the old iTunes folder...), connect the external drive and then fire-up iTunes? Or do I need to do it another way?

Click to expand...

If your entire library lives on an external drive, why not hook it up to your new machine and simply do an "add to library" with the option not to copy/move files in iTunes on your new machine? This will make a very clean iTunes library for you (might take some time if your library is large) but should work nicely.

I store my media on a NAS, I have had 3 different machines do the add to library successfully. Each machine had its own playlists. In your case, you may have to recreate playlists manually on the new machine using the method I mentioned.

On my rMBP my GBs of music are in my iTunes library stored on an external RAID set...along with GBs of photos and documents. The music is copied to my iPhone for use on trips.