iTunes Consolidation Trouble

[Pastorius]

So, here's the deal:

I recently acquired a Rev. B iMac G5, 17", 2.0ghz with superdrive and 1gb of RAM. That's all fine and dandy. Thing is, I want to transfer the songs on my iTunes library on my PC to my Mac. It seems simple enough, and I've read around before going off and posting this. Thing is, though, that my music on the PC is pretty spread out, its all over the place. And I have no more space, so consolidating onto a central location on my pc and then copying the folder with the .xml's for playlists and playcount info to my mac is not possible. I have ~25gb of music right now. I have a 40gb HD, and since it runs XP that means that I have, all in all, maybe 5gb of space after all XP files and music is accounted for. So y'see, impossible to consolidate on my PC.

Also, it's not the case of simply etting ALL my music files and copying them off; I use my playlists A LOT (as a matter of fact I have 100+ playlists). No way I'l afford to lose that. However, when I try to consolidate onto my Mac via the network (i.e. change iTunes folder to Mac iTunes folder, tick off the keep music organized and etc), I get an error which says "Copying Music failed. The disk could not be read from or written to". This is getting very old very fast. Also, the network is basically my only way to connect both computers. I don't have firewire on my outdated 966mHz Dell. So my only option is the network.

Oh, I also have an iPod, and I was thinking of using that. However, not all my songs are in playlists, and some are in more than one. Even though it seems like a good enough idea on paper, its inviable, I'd lose much information in the process of transferring to and fro with the iPod, like playlists and playcounts. So I'm stumped. Is there any other way of connecting my Mac to my PC, without using Firewire Target Mode? Also, does anyone know why this error is occurring? I can access my mac perfectly from my PC, and its there on the network (took me a while to get that working, though). Any thoughts? Can anyone help? Oh, and everything is up-to-date. I even updated my iTunes and still get zilch. Help me. Please.

 

[mad jew]

Can you connect the two for file sharing normally? As in, can you access the Mac from the PC over the network? Do you have Windows sharing enabled on the Mac in the System Preferences (under Sharing)? Also, is the Mac running the inbuilt firewall?

 

[Pastorius]

I can, yes, if I simply disconnect the PC from the hub and hook it up to the mac directly. Yes, I can access the Mac from the PC. It's what I've been using for the transfer of photos and word document files and whatnot. I just drag and drop, really. The firewall was down by default when I first started up the mac, and it's still down now.

Any ideas, mr. Mad?

Edit: actually, it doesnt matter if its connected to the hub or not, since my PC is finding my mac through its network IP. Sorry, my bad. Either way, my mac is fully accessible from the PC.

 

[mad jew]

How about deleting everything from the iPod, enabling it for disk usage and then consolidating the library onto that?

 

[Pastorius]

I thought of that, but my iPod is a 20-gig (i.e. 18gb of "real space"). I have 25 "real" gb of music, and I don't know what happens if I run out of space for consolidation. A 40gb iPod would be very handy, but no can do. I'm guessing I won't be able to keep track of what goes on the iPod and what doesn't. If there was a way of isolating the music thats not in playlists (other than by using a smart playlist, although that might be doable), and if those non-playlisted songs were enough to make the music fit on two trips, I'd be fine. Maybe I should use a smart playlist? But how would I consolidate only SOME songs onto the iPod?

Also, I have no external drives, which would help a lot... Just the 250gb one in the Mac and the 40gb one in my PC, as well as the 20gb one in the iPod.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, well could you get at least 7GB of music from iTunes and drag it into the iPod and transfer it across manually. Now, delete those songs from iTunes on the PC and then, having deleted everything from the iPod again, consolidate your library onto it as it'll now fit. This will keep play counts and playlists for that 18GB of music however the initial 7GB will have to be manually added to iTunes sans-playlist info. So, choose that first 7GB carefully. Sorry for the weird work-around but I don't know why consolidating over the network isn't working.

By the way, aim for a little more than 7GB that first time so that you're not caught short with the consolidating later on.

 

[Pastorius]

Makes enough sense... Is there any way I can build a Smart Playlist with all the songs that have no playlist? Is there perhaps a program for this? It'll speed things up considerably.

 

[mad jew]

I can't think a quicker way than simply creating a new Smart Playlist with each parameter being "Playlist is not..." for every playlist you have other than this new one ensuring that you set it to "match any rule", not all. It's a pretty long and painful process if you have lots of playlists though, sorry.

Hopefully someone smarter will be able to stump up a better/quicker solution though.