Transferring music - Mac Virgin

I've been a Mac owner for about 3 days now, and my first task is transferring all my itunes and playlists from my old PC to my new Macbook Pro. I have spent hours researching this and trying different things but I have not been able to transfer my music and playlists.

My general process for this is first organizaing and consoliding files on my PC, transferring everything to a 16gb flash drive, and then copying it into the music folder on my new Mac. But the muisc and playlists just never show up.

Any help anyone can provide would be so much appreciated!

Ok, so you actually need to import the tunes into iTunes, not directly into the music folder.
Open iTunes and drag the contents of the flash drive over the iTunes window, and it will automatically create an iTunes library in the music folder.
As for the playlists you have created, as long as they are iTunes playlists, you can copy the xml file onto the flash drive, and then import it into iTunes from the file menu. This will create the same playlists in iTunes as they were on the PC.

Thanks! That at least points me in the right direction. I actually do think I tried this, only when I did what you described only some of my album art came over. I thought I did something wrong and just started over. Is this right?

As far as the playlists go, do I need to export each playlist separately?

Album art is stored separately unless embedded in the files, so that's why you only got a few I suspect.
As for playlists, just the one xml file will contain all of your playlists, so no, just the one file.

Sorry for yet another question. So will I just need to re-upload all of the album covers? Thanks again for the help! I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.

If you are on a network you can use home sharing to import your whole library from one computer to the other. Would that work for you?

suttoc said:

Sorry for yet another question. So will I just need to re-upload all of the album covers? Thanks again for the help! I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.

Click to expand...

Well add them to the mp3 files, yes. Annoyingly you now have to go into info for this or highlight every track on the album and drag the cover art into the cover window.

prrs4me said:

If you are on a network you can use home sharing to import your whole library from one computer to the other. Would that work for you?

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion! I will try that as well. Will my playlists copy over using that option?

suttoc said:

Thanks for the suggestion! I will try that as well. Will my playlists copy over using that option?

Click to expand...

No. I just did this for a friend of mine and had to do the xml copy thing for him.

I recently had a similar experience.. although I wanted to share my iTunes library between users so when I copied my music from my external hard drive - I put it in a shared music folder on the iMac and the pointed both user accounts iTunes settings to this folder and it picked them up in the library no problem!.. there was some issues with album art as well - but I just let iTunes get the album art for me.. has worked perfectly ever since!