Question about switching....

Quick and dirty method: network the new imac with your current pc and transfer your itunes music folder on the pc to the itunes music folder on the mac. Then open itunes and select 'file' then under that 'add to library'. You'll have to authorise your new systems with your itunes account to play the itunes bought music.

 

Does your old Dell have a DVD burner? If so, the easiest way would probably be to copy your iTunes folder to a DVD. 300 files x 6megs each = 2 gigs? You can fit 4.5 gigs or so on one DVD.

Then copy the folder from the DVD to your Mac desktop. Then use iTunes "File > Add To Library ..." to select the folder on your desktop and get all the songs copied into your the Mac's iTunes folder. (Make sure you have the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" option checked in the iTunes preferences.)

Alternately, if both the Dell and the Mac are on the same network, you should be able to make the Dell's iTunes Music folder shared, then use the Mac Finder "Go > Connect to server..." to connect to the Windows share (with something like "smb://ipaddress") and skip the DVD burning step. But this was hit-and-miss for me -- mainly because my router wouldn't let my two machines see each other for some reason.

Hope this helps!

boxlight

 

It's easier if you have an iPod/external drive. Just click and drag your iTunes music folder (which presumably has all of your music/videos in it) onto your iPod (disk use enabled) or external drive. From iTunes on your Mac, then click File > Add folder to library, and pick your iTunes music folder from your external drive/iPod.

 

As long as a hard drive is formatted as FAT32, it should be fine. Even if it were NTFS, you could still copy stuff onto the Mac but you just wouldn't be able to put anything on the NTFS disk from the Mac.

 

I would find a cheap FireWire hard drive enclosure somewhere, put your drive into it, and plug it into the Mac so you'd have super fast file transfers from it, and would be able to get any documents you still wanted in addition to your MP3s.

Then, when you're done moving your stuff, you could reformat the external drive to a Macintosh format, and use it as a nice external storage solution.

 

It's possible becuase I moved all my music from my PC to Mac successfully.

If all your music from your PC iTunes is on an iPod, it's easy. Here is what I would do.

1) Get this program iPod rip from http://www.thelittleappfactory.com/index.php . You get an unrestricted free trial so you can just use it once for getting your iTunes music. Install it on your Mac.
2) When you plug in the iPod to the Mac - DO NOT SYNC WITH iTunes...YOUR MUSIC WILL BE ERASED because it will format the iPod to Mac.
3) Run the iPod rip program.
4) I believe the program will put your music in the Mac's iTunes folder, but if not then move the music.
5) If everything checks out, then run iTunes and format the iPod for Mac. Your music on the Mac from iTunes you just transferred will be synced and automatically downloaded back onto the iPod.

Really the iPod rip software is easy to use. You just run it, plug the iPod in and hit recover iPod. I was dreading having to move my music from my old PC to my current iMac but this made it too easy. Just follow the instructions.

Good luck!

 

I used an ethernet cable as it is much quicker than these methods (up to 1GB/s I think), if you have one and the dell has an ethernet port, connect your computers together, share the folder on your dell (right click -> share this folder), then, on your iMac, select network, find the files, and drag.

 

I agree though a 6 year old Dell probably doesn't have gigbit ethernet, might not even have ethernet at all.

The Firewire Drive enclosure is a great idea, especially since you can use the drive afterwords. The drive is probable 20-40gigs, so you may eventually want to spend the $50-100 for a 250-400gig drive to put in it. But that all depends on your storage needs.

 

That's 1 gigabit per second, not one gigabyte per second (that would be astronomical networking performance!). So thats like 125 megabytes per second under perfect conditions if I'm correct. Regardless, a six year old Dell probably does not have Gigabit ethernet built in. FireWire 400, 800, and USB 2.0 would all be better options than 100Base-T, which is most likely what it has.

 

I would burn the 300 MP3s.

 

I did this when I brought my first Mac home. This was before I'd bought anything on iTunes, so I'm only talking about the hundreds of MP3s and WAVs I had collected on my old PC over the years.

I had set up a home network, and both the Mac and PC were on the wireless net. I shared a folder from the Mac [using SharePoints, I think, but regardless, I had Windows file sharing enabled on the Mac], browsed Network Neighborhood on the PC [Windows 2000], clicked the shared folder, logged in with my Mac user & pass, and dragged the files from a Windows Explorer folder view into the Mac folder. I made a new folder there named "transfer", first, and dragged the files into that.

I let it copy and left it, so I don't know how long it took. Next morning, on the Mac, I dragged all those files into the iTunes window, and again left it, letting iTunes take its time adding all those songs to its Library. Next day, I deleted the "transfer" folder after checking a bunch of songs to see if they all transferred. They seemed to, and the Mac's HD space seemed to reflect the entire collection's arrival. I could then delete "transfer", since iTunes copied the files into its own folder and I didn't need the "transfer" copies any longer.

 

Congrats. on Swiching