Can I copy an iTunes Library from another Mac

Question

Can I copy an iTunes Library from another Mac?

Just to be clear I am interested just in Music / Music Playlists - mostly ripped CDs or mp3 files with a couple of on-line purchases.

My wife ripped our joint CD collection to her Mac many years ago. We share an Apple ID for purchases.

When I bought an iPod, Rather than repeat the very time consuming task, I copied to my Windows XP machine, although I had to modify many of the names, as they were too long.

Since then I acquired a Mac, and this still has the old iTunes Library, but I would like to tidy it up and synchronise the two.

My plan would be to delete my ~/Music/iTunes and replace with a copy, although I am open to suggestions. This is the process I used initially in 2011 to copy to Windows. (I may need to copy ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist)

My /Music/iTunes is currently ~22GB

I do not play music on my Mac, it is used solely to synchronise to my iPhone, iPad etc.

Answer 1

Not sure what you need past this article, but sure - you just need two folders worst case:

• https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204318

  1. The folder where the library index and cached files exist.
  2. The media folder if it’s not a sub folder of #1 above.

You will want to tell iTunes on the sending copmputer to reorganize all media files and copy/move them to the data folder and then run the “organize” command once or twice to be sure all the files are correct - organized and in the right folders.

Then move the two (one) folders to the new computer and point itunes to the correct location of the library. iTunes won’t merge two libraries - so be sure you don’t expect a merge on the receiving computer.