Merging Two iTunes libararies into one?

[marker227]

Okay guys, I have a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro. Both run on Maverick OS.

The laptop is my DJ-ing laptop, so I tend to keep that iTunes library updated the most. A year ago I copied my complete music library from my desktop to my laptop in order to have both of the computers current on my music.

I'm looking at the iTunes library on my desktop and laptop. The desktop has 7390 songs. The laptop has 6068 songs.

Is there anyway to find out which songs were not transferred to the laptop?

I can't think of any easy way to do this.

 

[phrehdd]

There are ways to do this but I admit I have never done it myself.

The first way is to go into iTunes and select your music section, then go to File from above and select print and pic I guess a custom layout (experiment). After that select the PDF option for the list. Try to get your song titles first.

You can then copy/paste to a text file from the PDF (bring up the PDF in preview). There are some text editors that can do a contrast and compare of files. This is what you would want to do rather than just eyeball the difference.

If your goal is to make both "equal" with songs, copy the larger library to a disk and then hook it to your other library and "add to library." If the file exists, you have an option of passing over it and if it doesn't exist, it will copy it over (assuming your preferences are set up correctly).

Hope this helps get you started. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some sort of software out there that would parse and compare libraries.

 

[marker227]

Is there a way to see the files that were added if I use your method? I'm trying to determine what songs are actually missing. I may not want them at all.

 

[arjen92]

This probably wont help you, but you could just add all 7390 of them to the library with only 6068 songs. Then make iTunes show the duplicates and delete those. But you'll probably have to delete 6068 songs manually .

 

[marker227]

Grrr this is annoying... I don't know how to fix this. I have to have this done by the 22nd. I'm getting rid of this computer.

 

[pagansoul]

This may not be what you want to hear but I am going to give my old Mac Pro to my brother. It has over 20k of my music files. I'm just going to download iTunes to an extra external HD (WD 500GB) so I have them all. I have about 10k on my mini but I figure I'll add the missing when I have time. I don't need all of them as the Pro had my entire library ripped from my CDs but my mini only has what I listen to most. I also have a lot on my Amazon cloud.