What's the best way to transfer music between computers after iTunes Match?

Question

I've pretty much uploaded everything to iTunes Match now, but my collection is across two computers and so it has merged everything together... Which is fine. However, I was planning on moving some of my items from one computer to another (i.e. from my smaller iTunes Library on the MacBook to the main iTunes Library on my PM G5).
Since it is all nicely synced now, I've discovered that if I use Home Sharing, then transferring the files manually seems to duplicate them on iTunes Match. So instead of doing this, I'm downloading them from the cloud on my PM and then deleting them on the MacBook once they're done... All good so far. However, a bunch of my music is in ALAC and so I don't want to do it this way because I'll end up downloading the files at 256kbps AAC instead.
So I just wanted to know, is there a good way of getting already-synced ALAC files from one machine to the other without having to get iTunes Match to re-sync them all over again?

Answer 1

You can preserve such metadata - worth an initial trial on simply moving as outlined - if metadata is lost you can reinstate by accessing the itunes library .xml file, to force itunes to read it you would need to clear the .itl file (if essential this will work but it is best avoided since it requires iTunes to rebuild your library from the .xml file).