Today i'm going to show you how to transfer your iTunes library. For this demonstration i'm going to be transferring my library off my windows 7 laptop onto my HP server. So we're going to start i'm going to show you iTunes, i've got quite a few songs. I want you to take a look at this video right here it's called "wake up". When we're done this will be right where it is now but on the server. Since thats the one i'm going to be copying it to. First thing we're going to do is just exit out of iTunes. Now you're going to need an external hard drive, i'm using a 500 gig elements hard drive powered by Western Digital. I'm going to just plug that in, let the computer auto-detect it. Continue without scanning. Go to open folder to view files. I'm going to go to My Computer and go to backup where I store all of my stuff. Now this was copied, this directory was made back when I was using XP so i'm going to go to Documents, Settings, My Documents, My Music. Now you can see there's already a lot of stuff in here. what i'm going to do is i'm just gonna delete all that. Whilst i'm doing that, Windows 7 uses libraries instead of storing the My Music folder in My Documents. I can just go right here to My Music, and you can see it's got all these files in it. What i'm going to do is i'm gonna highlight and copy every file in the my music folder. Notice it's got this iTunes folder here, you want to copy that too especially. Minimize that. Now the folder in the external hard-drive is empty, just paste and this will copy all of our files to the external hard-drive. I have about 30 gigs worth of music on here so this may take a while, so you may want to find something to do in the meantime. Now while we're waiting for my laptop to copy all the files to the external drive, we're going to go on the server, (my server is an old HP desktop running Windows XP professional) i've already downloaded the iTunes setup file, so we're going to run that now. I don't like to use iTunes as the default player. Ok iTunes is done installing now, so, finish, agree to the terms. Go throught the iTunes assistant. Tell it we don't want it to find the music files because that would just be a waste of time as we're going to be transferring the iTunes library. I'm going to choose to keep the iTunes music folder organised. Finish. Ok. Now iTunes has opened up for the first time. What i'm going to do now is close iTunes and go on back over to the laptop to see if it's done copying it. Now that we're done installing iTunes on the server, we're going back to the laptop which appears to be finishing copying all the files. Now copy and replace. Now all these files are in here. So what we're going to do is eject the external hard drive, then bring it over to the server and copy the files into the my music folder on the server. Plug it into the server and when the autoplay comes up, Open Folder to View Files, go to backup, documents and settings, my documents, music. Now that's all the music now that we copied from the laptop. Highlight all this, copy it, open up my documents, my music. Delete the iTunes folder as we're going to overwrite that anyway and paste all the files from the laptop into the my music folder. All the music is copied to the server now so lets open iTunes. There we go. Notice it looks pretty much exactly the same. Go up to movies. Remember I told you to keep an eye on that video "Wakeup"? Well here it is. Everything has now transferred. Remember that when you do this you will have to re-authorize anything that you have purchased from iTunes.
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