iTunes Ratings exporting to External Harddrive

[Lindyguy]

My laptop harddrive is almost full and I'm going to switch to DJing from an external harddrive. My concern is that all my ratings will not carry over to the external.

I'm not code savvy so would need help as if explained to a fifth grader.

I talked with Brent offline and he said there was a related topic here but I've gone back to topics from 2004 with no luck in finding info like this.

Can anyone help me out?

If it matters, my external is a WD Passport (usb powered).

Thanks for any help you can give me!

[Haydn]

My laptop harddrive is almost full and I'm going to switch to DJing from an external harddrive. My concern is that all my ratings will not carry over to the external.

I'm not code savvy so would need help as if explained to a fifth grader.

I talked with Brent offline and he said there was a related topic here but I've gone back to topics from 2004 with no luck in finding info like this.

Can anyone help me out?

If it matters, my external is a WD Passport (usb powered).

Thanks for any help you can give me!

OK - I can't guarantee any of this advice is correct, but ...

Are you using PC or Mac? My first thought is, are you sure you can't get a bigger internal HD for the laptop? I think you'd find things much easier that way. Basically, if you carry round a laptop AND a hard disk, you are relying on two things working instead of one.

If you do want to use an external drive for your iTunes music, I think it's pretty straightforward, and no, you won't lose your ratings or other criteria or tags. Looking at my Mac now, the iTunes Preferences Advanced screen has 'iTunes Music Folder Location' - I THINK all you need to do is change this to let iTunes know that your music is on an external hard disk. You can find quite a lot of help on this subject on the internet.

[Cyrano de Maniac]

Just in case it matters, Terry is on a Windows machine. And sorry Terry, I thought there was such a topic on here. I could swear I read something on the topic once, I guess I was mistaken.

Wouldn't it be tougher to preserve ratings if he swaps the internal hard drive? In that case you can't depend on iTunes to preserve it's rating/etc database as you transfer the files themselves between drives.

When I had to have my Mac laptop replaced under warranty I found all the necessary files in the system and was able to copy them into the right places, and everything "just worked". I don't know if it'd be that easy under Windows or not. Perhaps someone has experience doing just that?

Brent

[dogpossum]

Before you do anything, 6 words: back up back up back up.

[Nate Dogg]

I am not sure what software or format you use. What I do is use utilize the comments field stored within the MP3s metadata. I actually have a pretty elaborate system of tags that I use and I write filters that build lists on whatever computer I am using (ex: all the songs that I like to play between 150 and 159 BPMs, songs by genre, and so on...). However, that is too much details for this post.

I never bother with the ratings systems within audio player software. I don't want to be tied to a particular piece of software. I imagine you can do the same thing if you other formats instead of MP3s.

Somewhere in the long Laptop DJing thread a lot of this stuff came up.

Nathan

[Haydn]

Just in case it matters, Terry is on a Windows machine. And sorry Terry, I thought there was such a topic on here. I could swear I read something on the topic once, I guess I was mistaken.

Wouldn't it be tougher to preserve ratings if he swaps the internal hard drive? In that case you can't depend on iTunes to preserve it's rating/etc database as you transfer the files themselves between drives.

When I had to have my Mac laptop replaced under warranty I found all the necessary files in the system and was able to copy them into the right places, and everything "just worked". I don't know if it'd be that easy under Windows or not. Perhaps someone has experience doing just that?

Brent

I use iTunes v7.7 on two Macs - an iMac and a MacBook. I normally use the iMac on a daily basis and back up my iTunes music and data periodically to an external firewire hard drive, and then update iTunes on the MacBook. All I do is drag and drop the iTunes folder from the iMac to the hard disk, then from the hard disk to the MacBook. It Seems to work fine, and I think I've ever lost any data or settings, except where I've had different versions of iTunes on the different computers - as long as I keep the same version on both computers, it seems fine.

So it should work fine either way, whether you move to an external drive or a new internal drive, just copy the iTunes folder. I suggest googling this as well for further help and reassurance. P.S. Don't forget to back up

[mr. e]

I havn't verified it, but I'm pretty sure that the ratings data is included in the library .XML file that itunes stores.
I've offered here in the forum to collect iTunes library files to collect BPM data (we could also collect tagging and rating data, FWIW) to build a database of BPM values, but so far I havn't received any response.