Merging two separate libraries

Question

Hi All,
I have literally for about five months been working on this problem. I created an iTunes server several years ago with a giant amount of space, RAM, and now 17,000 songs! It's on Win XP. My laptop is Win 7, and for awhile home share worked fine, then stopped working out of the blue. I tried every trick up here that I could read about--little tips, tricks, major overhauls, nothing worked, but we did finally get to the point using those tips where the XP machine could see the Win 7 library and play it, but the Win 7 machine could never see the rest of the network, so since I spend most of my time on the Win 7 machine, no good to me.
In the months I spent working on this, I acquired a fairly sizable library on my Win 7 laptop so I'd have something to listen to. So I finally decided I was never going to get Home Share to work as long as they were on mixed OS's, I got a legal copy of Win 7 to install on the XP machine, installing as we I type, and taking a long time because I'm also using Aloha Bob to create a perfect mirror back up on an external drive should anything go wrong with the install.
So say the two machines being on the same OS solves the home share problem. Now I have the problem of a 400mb iTunes library on the laptop that needs to be merged with the main iTunes server, so I get back to just having one central location where all the media streams from. I'd like in the merge to keep the 100+ playlists I've created as well. Does anyone know if iTunes has this ability built in, or do I need to buy a third party software to do the trick? I've wasted so much time on this it's just stupid, so I just would rather pay $25 or whatever to just be able to merge the libraries, have it work simply, and go back to what I'd worked so hard to create: a well organized and maintainable iTunes library with every bit of my media, serving up to the home network, and backing up automatically at a very large external drive meant to be its back up.
Any help would be so appreciated, as you can see it's been a long and irritating process and I would have given up long ago if I hadn't invested so much time in the iTunes server.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Barry,
You can take the entire iPhoto library folder from the powermac to the powerbook. Rename it first, (ex: iPhoto Library Powermac) and just copy the whole folder over. (To check that it works on the Powerbook after the move, launch iPhoto with the Option key depressed. You will be asked to choose a library, which you can then navigate to.) To merge the 2 libraries, the only way to do it and preserve your keywords, albums, etc. is to use the paid version of iPhoto Library Manager.
I'm no expert. Read Old Toad's advice here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3560963&#3560963
or search for "merge iPhoto Library Manager" and restrict by user Old Toad.