combining itunes libraries from my mac and my pc on an external hard drive? Problems.

[jrm27]

Hi all,

I have two computers, a PC and and Mac. Each has an itunes library. I want to combine both those libraries on an external hard drive that I keep plugged into my mac, and I'm running into some snags.

I went out and bout a 2tb hard drive and was able to succesfly "consolidate" my PC itunes library to it. My plan was to plug the hard drive into my mac and do the same thing (consolidate my Mac library to the same folder that I had consolidated my PC library to). However, I quickly found that since the PC is formated as Windows NTFS, MAC can't write to it. It appears that it can read the drive, but not write to it.

So, two questions.
1. What format do I need to make the 2tb hard drive so that my MAC can read/write to it, but also that my PC can recognize it so I can transfer all my PC library to it?
2. Is my methodology correct to rech my desired end?
a. consolidate PC itunes library to external hard drive
b. consolidate MAC intunes library to same folder
c. then repopulate my itunes on my MAC with the new itunes library on the external hard drive

Does that sound right? Thanks for any help!

-jon

 

[notjustjay]

I don't know about consolidating iTunes libraries, but if you want your Mac to read a PC-formatted drive, you'll need to format it as FAT32.

Personally, I keep a 1 TB drive in a NAS device (D-Link DNS-323) and my media is on board that. I can play it as a shared library from any of my iTunes installs, and also see it from my PS3, etc. However, that has its own limitations.

 

[Mr Kram]

fat 32 is the format, but it is god awful slow on both machines. do you want to keep all of your metadata?

 

[jrm27]

As in my play counts and ratings? Naw, not really concerned with that. But I do want to keep the normal metadata (artist, album, etc...)