Transferring iTunes from PC w/external drive to new Mac

[JC III]

Brand new convert to Mac here: After receiving an iPod Touch from my boss when he upgraded to an iPhone, I have fallen in love with the Mac hardware and OS. I just got a new macbook and would like to transfer my iTunes from my old PC laptop. I am also a neophyte to iTunes so forgive me if there is a very simplistic answer to this issue.

The physical music is located on my external drive connected to the PC with the iTunes original music locations pointed to it . My specific question is, if I backup iTunes, restore to the Mac, plug in the external drive to the Mac, will it work seamlessly? I'm not sure if the existing iTunes music locations will re-synch since the music locations on the laptop iTunes are mapped to the "G:" drive. If it won't work that way, what do you recommend as the best way to go about it? I want to make sure I don't waste as much time as when I initially set up my iTunes/iPod touch (simply stuck in "PC" mindset).

Thank you for your help.

 

[Consultant]

google:
itunes transfer pc site:forums.macrumors.com

 

[JC III]

Thanks for the advice. I found this in the search:

"As long as your iTunes library was kept in the default iTunes Music folder in Windows (~/My Documents/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Music in Windows as I recall), you should be able to copy your music into ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music and put your library file in ~/Music/iTunes and be good to go. This is because the iTunes database uses relative linking when everything's in the default place, so the "Windows vs. Mac path style" thing never comes into play. If you kept your iTunes library on a different hard drive though, then things might be more complicated (by which I mean "you're pretty much boned, and should just re-import the audio files and swallow losing playcounts/ratings/playlists/etc.")."

Therein lies my fear: I have 300Gb of music on the server and the iTunes only have a portion of those within it, separated into many playlists. I would woefully dread individually finding (the file structure on my server is multi-leveled and not the most user friendly) and copying those 32Gb of files (fit on my iPod Touch) to my Mac iTunes. I would think there would have to be an easier way, but so far the comments on the googled pages do not offer that option.

Hopefully someone here will have more insight so that I won't have to keep my iTunes on my PC (or run it within the VMware Fusion).

 

[Consultant]

NO, you can convert the play list.

Lifehacker has an article. 242468

 

[JC III]

Ahhhh! It looks like using find/replace in the library.xml file to use the appropriate mac based syntax for the external drive and purposefully corrupting the .itl file may be the keys.

After numerous bad experiences with the "keep iTunes folder organized" option, and I don't want the music copied to either my PC's or Mac's drive, I'm definitely not going to use those options. However, after reading the comments below the how-to, it may be as simple as this article I eventually got pointed to: http://hifiblog.com/past/2006/05/11/howto-move-your-itunes-music-while-preserving-library-data-when-you-dont-let-itunes-manage-your-music-library/.

Hopefully that will work...unless someone reading this knows why it wouldn't.

Thanks for pointing in the right direction.