iTunes help - new Mac user.

Hi,

I have just bought my first ever Mac (MBA) and want to make sure I do the right thing before setting up iTunes on it.

My old windows PC has 40,000 songs on it but i don't want all these clogging up my Mac. There's also a lot of duplicates and i think this would be an ideal time to take the opportunity to tidy them up. Most of these songs are also backed up on external hard drive.

What's the best way to go about this? It feels like it's going to be a massive chore. Is is best to sync from the external hard drive going forward or put the track i need onto the Mac?

I'm also considering buying a wireless external hard drive so that all the devices in the family (there's a lot of them!) can access music, photos, videos etc so any advice about that would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

itunes will really only play downloaded movies via their store. Or if you convert your films to m4v drm. With the music mp3 types lose the information and your left looking at track 1 to infinity if a lot to load. Same again to convert them to acc. With mac though you can attach the hard drive wireless via lan or by usb. You can access via the system preference setting under sharing and select the hard drive. You need to communicate via ethernet between all devices and best write down each mac code for the devises using the main router and allocate only those specific for use.

Everything in iTunes on the Windows machine?
Turn on Home Sharing in iTunes on both computers - link.

You can then move the ones you want onto your Mac and still be able to stream to your Mac any of the ones you decide not to move.

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Turn on Home Sharing in iTunes on any computer you want to share the library with.
All computers will be able to look at and stream from the library from all the others.
I have a Win HTPC that stays on 24/7 with our main library.
Each person can copy what they want onto their own computer for playing while away from home - based on their own hard drive space.

Thanks bobtmay.

Of course, home sharing!

I'm now having trouble getting my MBA to access the Windows PC? The connection keeps failing and 'connecting as' asks for a password? I don't have a password on the Windows PC? I've tried opening the TCP/UDP ports using Windows firewall but that didn't work either?

Are you trying to access it in Finder or in iTunes?

If you are in iTunes shouldn't need anything - Home Sharing does all the work here.

If you are attempting to access your windows in Finder, then you'll need to turn on Sharing on your Windows machine and share whichever folders you want to share - this is not Home Sharing. Because I keep my iTunes media on an external RAID drive attached to my Windows box - I have shared only that RAID drive. My Mac has no access to anything else on my Windows machine except the Public folder.

Got it now.

Thanks mate.

When you're in iTunes and select the Windows shared library in the sidebar - notice at the bottom of the right window a drop down box where you'll be able to select to see everything or only what is different between the 2 libraries.

While you're browsing the shared library, you can either stream from there without moving it or you can drag and drop whatever you want to move into your local library (drop onto the top of the sidebar) and this will copy it over.