Copying itunes files from an external HD into my itunes library

I've tried 2 methods - drag and drop from the HD directly into the library; and 'add to library' from itunes, then selecting the albums from the external HD. Either way, the process is resulting in 2 copies of each song being added to my library. The only way I can bring in only 1 copy of a song is to actually open the album, then highlight the individual songs. Much more time consuming! I can't figure out why highlighting the songs is different from simply highlighting the albums. thanks for any advice or guidance!

Do you have any exported playlists / library (XML) files on your external HD? If there are, while you're trying to add files, iTunes might be adding those playlists and because of that there could be 2 of the same songs showing at the same time. (I think you cannot add .xml files directly by drag&dropping anyway)
If I'm correct, then identify the file types of those playlists (."something") then do a search for those, and delete all of the ".playlist" files. Then add all of your songs to your Library, it should be fine.

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I have copied my music library from two different files from extewrnal hard drive into the Itunes folder. I tunes only recognizes some of the songs. I have reloaded 5 times and can't get intunes to recognize all my songs? HELP!

I have copied my music library from two different files from extewrnal hard drive into the Itunes folder. I tunes only recognizes some of the songs. I have reloaded 5 times and can't get intunes to recognize all my songs? HELP!

" When I did this, my library showed all the music I have "purchased" from itunes but did not have the music that I downloaded a long time ago through itunes from my old CDs."
Correct.
" How can I get that music to show up in my library now on my new computer? "
Copy it from your old computer or your backup copy of your old computer.
The sync is one way - computer to ipod.

I imported files from an external hard drive to Itunes on a new computer. they imported & play fine, but the ratings & playlists are gone & i am unable to update any info. I found a file name playlist on old drive & imported now most files are missing!

I imported files from an external hard drive to Itunes on a new computer. they imported & play fine, but the ratings & playlists are gone & i am unable to update any info. I found a file name playlist on old drive & imported now most files are missing! Help!

Can you locate the iTunes Library.itl file on the old drive? Ideally you would have simply copied over the entire iTunes folder structure from <User's Music> on the old computer into <User's Music> on the new one to transfer the library will all playlists, ratings, play counts etc. intact.
tt2

How do i copy my files from my external hard drive onto my imac

how do i copy my files from my external hard drive onto my imac

You should be able to 'migrate them' without having to do so during a reinstall, from an external drive. In some cases, you may be able to use TimeMachine software even if the drive had not been used as a backup.
The usual way, though, is to drag & drop copy from one to another (volume or folder) you created in there and have open. Or drag an item on top of the icon of a hard disk drive when it is mounted on the desktop. I'm used to working with open folders and windows, because that works best; and then see if I want to change how things look inside their destination. This helps should I later want to burn them to a DVD and have it correct. And I want to know where they are.
I had more links to some information about importing or migrating data into a Mac from an external, a week ago, but can't find them now. A few good links to pages, but I think I posted what I did find directly to answer someones question about it; and believe the info was in an Apple Support article about TimeMachine, near the lower part of the page with blue words with a disclosure triangle, so you could read more in that page. But I don't believe these two are correct in that TimeMachine (some versions) only allow wireless backup to a drive in a base station unit such as Apple sells, for this. The link I saw simply said how to work around not using the wireless stuff. Maybe it was a dated item, not in these?
See a main general portal to TimeMachine support,
here: http://www.apple.com/support/timemachine/
Or basics that may not provide optional copy methods:
Mac Basics - Time Machine backs up your mac:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Perhaps a search of Apple Support database (or even ASC discussions?) would yield ideas, and perhaps find what may work for the kind of files you want to copy, and where they can be found & used later. Are the files for specific applications? Or images, music, etc?
Good luck & happy computing!
edited.

I am new with iMac and I am trying to copy some file from my external HDD but it does not let me also I can't delete anything from this HDD using the finder. Can somebody help me , please?

I am new with iMac and I am trying to copy some file from my external HDD that a used with my PC but it does not let me also I can't delete anything from this HDD using the finder. Can somebody help me , please?

No, unfortunately, when you format a drive, it will erase all the contents. So you will need to find a temporary "storage" place to put the stuff using a PC so you have access to it. Then reformat using Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities). If only using with mac, format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and use GUID Partition scheme under Partitions/Options. After formatting, you can drag the files back.

I have created a new profile and copied firefox files from my old computer into it. How do I switch to the new profile, do I just delete the old one?

I am running windows 7 I had to recover my files from an external hard drive when my old computer crashed. I have created a new profiles as outlined in the firefox website and copied all the files into it. I just need to know how to use this new profile when I open firefox, do I just delete the old profile? Or do I have to reinstall firefox.

If you no longer need or intent to use that older profile then you can use the Profile Manager to remove that profile and delete the files.
*http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager
*http://kb.mozillazine.org/Backing_up_and_restoring_bookmarks_-_Firefox
*http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

Restoring iTunes files from an external HDD?

I recently began receiving S.M.A.R.T. warnings of imminent failure from my hard drive, running XP SP3. I copied my Music folders and iTunes folders to an external drive just before my computer failed. Checked the external drive and everything was there...Audible books, iTunes Audiobooks, music (both purchased and ripped from CDs), TV series and quite a few movies. So I was feeling fairly confident that I had saved my extensive and expensive iTunes multimedia Library.
Purchased a new hard drive and installed Vista, SP1 64 bit Home Premium on two WD drives striped in RAID 0 without incident, installed iTunes and began the task of moving my collection from the external HDD back to my computer. I used the "Add Folder to Library" choice in iTunes as my preferences were set to manage my manually manage my downloads.
All went well and after quite awhile I had most of my collection moved into iTunes on the new hard drive. Then the rot set in. I disconnected and removed the external hard drive and settled down to play some music. Instead of music, I received an error message. An exclamation point appeared in front of the track I wanted to play and the message in a box said, "The song (title inserted) could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to try to locate it?" I hit cancel and tried several other titles until it sunk in that while the titles appear in iTunes, they won't play. Also much of the information in "Get Info" is grayed out, however, the size and type of the file is displayed along with bit rate and sample rate, but no music will play.
Next, I reattached my external hard drive where I had stored the files before the hard drive failure and magically, every single song, book and movie played perfectly.
So...I need some help in how to move not only the titles but the content from the external drive to the new install of iTunes. First post, I hope I'm in the right forum. If not, please direct me there. Thanks and all the best, Daisy

I did not rear all but the "add to library" is where the problem resides. You should have just copied your files to the hard drive (assuming this is the SOURCE you want itunes to point at) then use "add to library.

How to transfer or reassociate iTunes files from one external drive to another without reimporting?

Hello,
Hope someone can tell me an easy way to do this.
I have a massive itunes library which is presently split between my macbook and my external Lacie. I would like to transfer the files from the Lacie to a new external drive without reimporting all the files into itunes. I essentially would like itunes to recognise the path of the new drive instead of the files on the Lacie.
Any ideas?

I moved some movies and some seldom listened music (coped the files) into a folder on the Lacie drive. Then I reimported them to the main itunes library while holding down "option". This created a link to those files to the external. the files show up in my itunes but cannot be played unless i have the Lacie connected to them.
See this link.
http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_split_your_itunes_library_across_multi ple_locations

How to download all songs from my external drive into my itunes library

I have enough Gbytes to not use an external drive for my music.
How do I proceed to download all songs from the external drive on my internal drive?

Hello there, Laetidela.
The following Knowledge Base article offers up some great steps on how to move your iTunes library from an external hard drive to your computer:
iTunes: How to move your music to a new computer
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4527
External drive
This option requires more work than Home Sharing, but it creates a backup of your iTunes library on the external drive in addition to moving your content.
Notes before you start:
You can use most iPods as an external drive.
Windows operating systems don't recognize Mac OS-formatted disks (HFS or HFS Plus formats). Because of this, you can't use a Mac-formatted iPod or external drive to move your music to a Windows PC. See iPod: How to determine iPod's hard disk format if you're not sure how your iPod is formatted.
Mac OS X can read Windows-formatted iPods and drives. This means there are many ways to migrate your information from your old Windows-based PC to your new Mac.
Mac OS X: To be sure external drives appear on your desktop, choose Preferences from the Finder menu. Be sure the options for "External disks" and "Hard disks" are enabled.
Part 1: Locating and consolidating the iTunes Media folder
Part 2: Copy iTunes folder from the old computer:
Part 3: Get iTunes ready on your new computer
Part 4: Back up any music that's already on your new computer
Part 5: Copy music to your new computer
Part 6: Add preexisting music that was on the new computer back into the library
Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities.
Cheers,
Pedro.

Cannot copy and paste from an external document into InDesign cs6

I am unable to copy and paste from "anywhere" into my InDesign cs6? Not from emails, word, or any other programs? HELP. thanks.

You might find more accurate help here: http://forums.adobe.com/community/indesign (InDesign Forum)
Copying and pasting is not usually a good idea. Try using the "place" command to place your external files or documents into InDesign. Nevertheless, you should be able to copy text from Word or other programs with no problem. How are you doing it exactly? Try to do it not only with keyboard shortcuts, but using the actual "copy" and "paste" menus on both programs.

Copying video files from one external drive to another

Hello! I am very new to Apple and FCP, so please forgive my ignorance. I have looked through the other topics and have not found one that addresses my question, so please forgive me if this has been addressed in the past.
I am working on a project and have all of my video clips saved to a G-Tech G-Raid 320 GB extenal hard drive. I captured much of my footage using "capture now" instead of logging individual clips for various reasons (i.e.: some tape sources did not have timecode), so if I ever have a problem, simply recapturing the footage does not appear to me to be a valid option.
With this weighing heavily on my mind, I thought it would be best to copy the poject to a second G-RAID external hard drive.
However, the G-RAID uses an 800 firewire and my G5 computer only has one such port.
What would be the best way to copy from the one external drive to the other? Will I have to copy the files to my internal hard drive first? And if so, how do I do that? Thanks!!

Crystal,
Please reply to a specific post, not to your orignial one. This keeps the threaded discussion in order.
To see the format for a drive. Open Disk Utility. It is located in your /Applications/Utilities folder.
You should see all your connected drives on the left side of the window. Click on the icon of the drive you want information on. Select the Volume icon, not the Drive icon ( the volume icon is the one under and slightly indented to the right of the drive icon)
Look at the bottom of the window. You'll see an item FORMAT: it should say Mac OS Extended. If it says MS-DOS, you'll need to ERASE the disk. When you do that, you'll have the option of changing the format.
Do not right click and COPY. Simply drag the icon of the folder containing your media files from one disk to the other. It will copy by default.
good luck.
x

Taking HOURS to copy music files from one external hard drive to another...

Am I doing something wrong? Have a about 5,000+ songs on an external hard drive (hooked to my pc). I have networked the PC through my mac mini and I'm now copying those files onto a new/fresh external hard drive hooked to the mac mini. It's successfully copying the files but, when I started, the time remaining said, "About 15 hours"! (Is this for real??) Am I doing this right? It's now...finally down to "About 7 hours". But, I have a LOT more music to copy over. Is it normal for it to take THIS LONG?
PLEASE HELP!

Just to explain a bit about how this data transfer is far more than simply moving 5,000 songs:
To copy or move each file, the system has to chop the file up into a series of 'packets' and transfer each of those in order. If you imagine each file as if it were a plate of food heaped up, each 'packet' is about a single spoonful. Each spoonful then needs a series of extra data to tell the system what's in the spoonful, which spoonful it is in the order of things, and how many spoonfuls in that plateful to expect. Added to the spoonful is additional data containing information that lets the receiving system check whether the spoonful arrived is complete, out of sequence, damaged or even lost.
Each spoonful has to be sent one at a time, and the receiving system has to signal back to the sending system that it arrived before the next one is sent. Once the first plate has been sent, spoonful by spoonful, the system then moves onto the next plateful, until all 5,000 plates of food have been moved.
If any spoonful is lost or damaged, the receiving system has to ask the sending system to have another go before moving on to the next. Add to that that it is not just the spoonfuls of songs being moved around, but also lots of other spoonfuls of stuff to keep the network connection open and each system aware of the presence and identity of the other, and any other networked device that is also running at the time, and you have a pretty slow means to move data around.
The above is a pretty crude representation of how it works, but it does mean that while moving data around a network is not really slow, it's nowhere near as fast as moving data to locally connected drive. As such DaddyPaycheck is right - it would be much quicker to connect the external directly to the Mac and then copy the files to it.

How do I copy my files from an external drive to my new computer

I had all my music files on my old laptop whose motherboard burned out. I removed the hard drive, and would like to copy my old music files from my old hard drive to the internal hard drive in my new computer. I think I can do this one file at a time but there are like 4000 files so that is impossible

File -> Add folder to library.
Select the topmost folder with the music

How do I get FLAC files from a hard drive into my itunes

I have a library of FLAC and shnf files on a hard drive.
How do I get these files (grouped into hundreds of folders) into Itunes?

iTunes cannot play FLAC files. There are "plug-ins" that supposedly allow iTunes to handle FLAC, which you can investigate, but it would probably be better to convert the files to a format iTunes can handle, such as AAC.
As far as SHN files, there is not even a plug-in (the format is virtually unknown except Deadheads!) so conversion is the best answer.
A conversion tool you can use is Switch. You can use the newly converted files for your iTunes ibrary, and save the original FLAC and SHN files for when you use a more capable player.

Copying file from a local computer into mapped LAN share.

I tried to copy a file from a local computer into a Z: disc (a LAN share). I tried to use every method i found on the internet. Using io, nio.. nothing works. It works well on the local computer, but not through LAN. It says that there is not enough of system resources to go on (i'm talking about big files.. more than 200mb... small files are accepted).

Hi,
Flash itself has no filewriting capabilities other then the
SharedObject
stuff.
But why can't you call a php script? You could install
apache, PHP and
MYSQL on the computer running the Flash app and get it all
into the
database in one go.
Otherwise you either need to get going with AIR (Adobe
Integrated
Runtime), or use a wrapper application like Adobe Director
(which has
tons of ways to write to file through it's plethora of
Xtras.) Director
may be 'a bit' hard on your budget if you only use it for
this purpose
though.
The XMLSocket is for connections to some server, local or
remote, not to
a file.
Manno
graphic_pawn wrote:
> First, I'm using Flash CS3, and Actionscript3.
>
> I'm trying to set up a data collection form that will
save the results to a
> file that can later be imported into a database. This is
going to be in a Kiosk
> at a tradeshow and it won't have internet access, so I
can't send it to an
> online PHP or ASP, etc, script.
>
> The form also has several screens, so i thought I'd try
to use the Form
> Application (I know I can only have one frame on the
timeline when using this
> flash template with the data components). I want to try
and write the data to a
> XML file. All the information I've found is for
importing data from an XML file
> to a web server rather than sending data to an XML file
on a local computer.
>
> I'm trying to use the XML connector,and an XML file that
resides in the same
> folder as my Flash file, but so far I've had very little
luck writing to that
> XML file. Do I need to set up a dataset to send the form
data to that will then
> send the data to an XML Connector component that will
then send the data to the
> XML file. Should I use LoadVars instead, and if I do,
will I have to write to a
> script, or can it also write to an XML file.
>
> If any one has a better idea to do this, please let me
know.
>
> Thanks.
>
Manno Bult
http://www.aloft.nl

Copying itunes files from an external HD into my itunes library

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