Transferring 100GB music from PC to MacBook Air

[jpbates]

Hey, I've just bought a MacBook Air and am trying to transfer all my music from the PC (running Windows 7) and I don't want to just use Home Sharing as I intend to sell the PC.

I am currently trying to use Migration Assistant to wirelessly transfer the files but there's 100GB worth and it says it's going to take 35 hours. Surely there must be a quicker way - can you help? I also tried to do the 'Import' option through Home Sharing but this seemed no quicker and failed after transferring 4,000 tracks. If I then do it again it just adds duplicates, rather than replacing already moved tracks.

Thanks
James

 

[BreakGuy]

Have you got an ethernet cable lying around somewhere that you could use to connect the two together with? Ethernet transfer would be the fastest.

 

[jpbates]

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Yeh I do I think... How do you do that?

 

[jpbates]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Silly me there's no Ethernet on the MacBook Air

 

[BreakGuy]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yeh I do I think... How do you do that?

______________________________________________

Direct connect
To move files by connecting your Mac directly to your PC, if both have an Ethernet port:

• Connect your Mac to your PC using a standard Ethernet cable.
• Make sure that both computers are turned on.
• In the Finder on your Mac, choose Connect to Server from the Go menu to open the window.
• Type your PC's network address in the Server Address text box using one of these formats:
  
  smb://DNSname/ShareName​
  smb://IPaddress/ShareName​
• Click Connect.
• Follow the onscreen instructions to enter your PC's workgroup name, user name, password, and the volume or folder you wish to access.
• Your PC volume should appear on your Mac Desktop.
• Open the volume and drag and drop files directly from it to anywhere on your Mac.
• When finished, drag your PC volume to the Trash to unmount it.

______________________________________________

 

[01jamcon]

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Silly me there's no Ethernet on the MacBook Air

Well without an ethernet adapter, I think the quickest way would be to use an external hard drive to copy and paste all the music, if you don't have that, well, there's not any way quicker I can think of.

 

[jpbates]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Yeh I'll try that, the External Hard Drive has just been an issue because of the different formats between Mac and PC. Thanks for your suggestions!

 

[BreakGuy]

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Silly me there's no Ethernet on the MacBook Air

Crap. That's my fault. I should have read properly that you were using a MacBook Air.

Yea, your next fastest is probably going to be an external HDD. If you don't have one, use a large capacity USB stick and make a few trips. A hassle yes, but it'll get the job done relatively quickly.

 

[jpbates]

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I reformatted my HD to FAT and that's worked. All done.

 

[shyam09]

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I reformatted my HD to FAT and that's worked. All done.

hmm FAT isn't literally the fastest at writing. NTFS is [and it is read/write compatible on Windows and only Read compatible on OSX...
but the speeds on NTFS are > speeds on FAT...

So since you are only going to be dragging it off your Ext. HDD i suggest formatting it to NTFS, but if you read this afterwards, then don't sweat, it's not biggy. Now you can read and write on macs

 

[jpbates]

It's all done, thanks for taking the time to help!