Overwriting, copying, from pc to my Mac (iTunes)

Okay so I just got back from a 5 month tour in Iraq (blah) but I had taken my pc laptop with me as it was cheap and I didnt care much if it got ruined. Well I had taken a copy of my itunes folder from my mac and put it on my pc. While I was there as you can imagine on my down time I did things like super organize rename and clean up my itunes files. I also acquired a lot of new music while I was there. So here is my issue: I have an itunes folder on my pc that I would like to merge with my mac itunes. I dont want to go through the whole thing band by band to add the new ones and also I dont really want to find out which ones I cleaned up band names and song tracks. Is there any quick way to accomplish what I want to get done or am I looking at days and days of itunes reorganization?

Copy the Folder to the Mac and let itunes take over from there.

You wasted your time organizing imho......

On a slightly more constructive note. . .

There are several different ways to approach this....here's one:
1. copy your music from your pc to your mac, into a new folder.
2. start up itunes and change the preferences to point at your new folder.
3. let itunes add all the music from your new folder
4. have a dig around in itunes. Once you're happy that all your music is intact you can delete the old music folder.

HTH
mrplow

I am hearing a slightly different problem. You said "merge", which implies that the iTunes library you have on your PC is not just a superset of the iTunes library on your Mac, but something else... you have different sets of music on each and want essentially add them together, eliminating the overlaps. Is that the case?

Would you be happy to simply move the iTunes library from your PC back onto your Mac (the topic most of the above posters have covered) or are you looking to add the two collections (PC plus Mac) together and eliminate the overlaps?

It's looking like a merge is what's wanted from the PC (which acquired new music during the deployment) to the Mac. If one were to just drag 'n drop the entire iTunes folder from the PC to the Mac, you're going to get dups, which of course are annoying.

Which is why it's great you're going to the Mac side because you have the advantage of using some Apple Scripts from Dougs Scripts to eliminate those duplicates automatically. Just be sure to do a backup of both before you start, but the tools are out there to smooth out your collection once you've merged.

I wanted to say thanks first of all to the people who replied. What I was trying to get across in my wordy scrambled up initial post is that I wanted to merge the two folders back together with out having a bunch of dup's. I will try your suggestions out im not sure about how the script approach works as that is new land for me but im willing to give it a shot!..

Thanks

Here's another little trick I've learned (or at least use) when managing iTunes files. I use the star rating built into iTunes to help separate songs in the following manner, and might help you out in the future:

Five stars - Great song, I love it, fantastic!

Four stars - Great song, I love it, not quite fantastic, but still good.

Three stars - A song I have on a CD that I bought, or got from iTunes. In some way I've paid for it.

Two stars - Not used in my collection, but would if I were acquiring music on a different from my primary computer in some way so I could delineate that it is a new acquisition which can be easily sorted in iTunes on the other computer to move it over to my Macbook iTunes.

One star - The 'star of death', or The Death Star, used to delineate songs that I'm going to delete out of my collection. This does not mean that they suck, it just means that they are probably in .wav format for burning to CD from a playlist and once they have been burned they will still remain in my collection. Just in a more compact form like MP3. That way I can sort the Library by rating and anything with one star gets deleted eliminating dups. Kind of hard to explain, but if I have a collection of .wav files that I got from, say, recording an internet stream in a playlist I can assign them the single star so I can delete them out after I've encoded them to MP3 for iPod use.

Yeah, it's kind of convoluted, but it's a system that has worked for me.