Itunes conundrum

[admin_exported]

Hi All. Could I pick your brains for a bit?

I have recently got all my cd's back from my old flat and now I have cd's coming out of my ears. I would like to burn lots of cd's losslessly with a view to storing these cd's in my mothers loft. What I would like to know is this. What is the best way to store cd's on a mac (my missus currently has loads of cd's stored on her mac) with a view to taking just my cd's off later in the future.

So, in summary, there will be a mixture of mine and missus music, probably all stored on Itunes on a mac. In the future, I would like to remove my music (approx 400cd's worth) from her collection (approx 200) and put it on a separate computer at a later date. This other computer could be a mac or pc.

Is it possible to take off bulk music from itunes and copy it onto another computer? Is it a case of drag and drop?

I am sorry if this sounds confusing. It is confusing to me too.

Many thanks in advance, Lee

 

[El Hefe]

leenoris78,

Yes (at least for PC, not sure for Mac though). To me, there are 2 ways to do it:

1. When you rip the CDs on iTunes, it is stored to a folder in your hard disk. The location of the folder is usually set up when u install iTunes although it can be changed. You can plug in an external hard disk. Change the iTunes store location to the external hard disk and start ripping your CDs. Once done, you can change back the storage location to the original settings.

2. Just start ripping your CDs based on the current iTunes set up. Just take note of where the music files are stored on your Mac. When you want to transfer the tunes from your 400+ CDs, just go to the folder on your hard disc/Mac, copy the subfolders (of your tunes, usually arranged by Artists) onto an external hard disk to transfer it to another computer.

I hope it make sense what I just wrote. Sorry if its different for Mac. It works as above for PC on Windows.

 

[Dr Beat]

Hi

Just sharing. I was ripping CDs via iTunes in WAV format (selected from Preference in iTunes options) on to my laptop's HD. Then i decided to transfer it to my external HD so i could back up the ripped CDs. I selected the artists folders and opied to my new iTunes Music folder in my external HD. To my horror, when i connected the external HD to my wife's laptop, and selected the folder within it as my library for my iTunes, not all the folders were recognized. In fact, only the older ripping in Apple Lossless and some mp3 albums were recognized. Don't understand the technical explanation but the short of it was i had to convert my files to AIFF to retain the losslessness/uncressed CD quality files, so that it is recognizable when you transfer from one HD to another.

Again, just sharing my frustration of having to re-rip the CDs (don't trust the conversion option in iTunes will really do it correctly).

 

[Anonymous]

itunes is killing me softly.

Years ago used to work perfect,no issues,thesedays slows down,pc slow,itunes barely useable.....

jesus christ

 

[iMark]

iTunes uses Quicktime for conversions (like WAV to AIFF or AIFF to ALAC). I have never heard that any of these conversions have caused any problems.

 

[iMark]

Others have already explained how to work with folders with iTunes. I have an extra tip on storing lossless files. Instead of burning CD's you can also burn lossless files to a DVD. I have a backup of The Beatles box set on 1 DVD.

You can do this the following way:

1. Create a new playlist in iTunes

2. Drag all the tunes you want to backup to this playlist

3. Right click on the playlist, choose 'burn playlist to disc'

4. In the next screen choose 'Data CD or DVD', then click burn.

All the ALAC files in the playlist will now be copied to a DVD. You can't play this disc but you can import it to any iTunes library at a later date.