I recently replaced my 9yo Mac Pro with a new iMac (LOVE it, with a few reservations). I went through the “migration” process to move files to the iMac. For the most part it worked, except some files didn’t make it, mostly many music files. My music collection is mostly comprised of about 31,000 tracks from almost 2,200 CDs. Glad I saved them, just in case.
What’s the most efficient way to transfer select music files between Macs? I’m looking for a way to just dump the files somewhere and have them appear in the iMac.
(BTW, this experience confirms my absolute hatred of the Apple Mouse 2.)
Or maybe use a thumb drive. Thumb drive would be the most efficient but you’d have to do it in multiple steps since I doubt they will have enough room to do it in one go.
Seems maybe about 100GB of data so it will take a while no matter what. If uploading to the cloud set it to run before you go to bed. Then download in the morning (download is waaaay faster…will still take a long time).
If you can get both computers on the same network then you can just transfer directly from one to the other. (I changed my mind…this is most efficient)
Seems odd that migration didn’t move them.
Anyway, whatever mechanism you had the two computers connected should allow you to set up file sharing. You can then do a straight copy across in the finder.
If you have any Unix chops there are lots of command line ways of doing it as well.
Do you know where they are as files? (I am asking this because Apple has been pretty obnoxious over the years, via iTunes in particular, about obscuring exactly where-the-fuck the music FILES are actually located).
If so, it should be easy to hook the old computer and access its HD and move the files over.
If you only know of the tracks via their presence in iTunes, and they aren’t showing up on the new box, you may have the files just fine but iTunes is oblivious about where they are located.
In iTunes, you can right click on the title of a song in your library (well, right-click on PC) and in the context-based menu that pops up, you can click “Show in Windows Explorer” and it will open the folder where the file is located, which should help figure out where all the music files are located.
(I know the OP is on a Mac, but figure there’s something similar if they need to locate the files.)
And the location isn’t really obscured, at least not on PC - apart from the above method to locate the files, going to Preferences → Advanced, the first thing on the screen is “iTunes Media folder location” which is the exact location where iTunes put the files (assuming you have iTunes organizing your files for you).
I use GooglePlay and the music you buy is (almost) never on your PC. Only in the cloud.
You can download them but you need to make a specific effort to do so. I do so I can listen to my jams on a plane where I have no internet access.
I remember I swore off ALL things Apple when I had iTunes, bought music and then when I moved to Android they told me I could not move that music. Never forgave them. Have not and will not buy an Apple anything ever since. Pretty sure they don’t care.
I have a Mac Pro desktop. When I bought a Macbook Pro, I just connected them via Bluetooth and dragged folders and files from the desktop over to the laptop. Music, some photos, work stuff, etc.
I just helped a friend with an ailing MacAir which was a bit full. I have a very useful external drive, a capacious 1Tb SSD in a USB caddy. First thing I did was to copy the entire drive to the external drive using the Mac Diskutil. This copied 128Gb in about 4 hours. With the whole system safely copied, I copied his huge photo library to the external drive (to be extra sure) then deleted the Picture folder which freed up 50Gb or so. With that space freed up I was able to reinstall MacOS, which sorted out many issues. Then I copied the Picture folder back again. These transfers were a good deal faster than copying the entire system, so I was done in another hour.
I did not have the luxury of another Mac of the same vintage to try anything like AirDrop or Bluetooth and I know the performance of iCloud can be quite glacial.
External drives are very simple to use and quite intuitive for the less experience user. The SSD versions without moving parts small, light and more robust than spinning rust drives, which is a bonus. Flash thumb drives are not quite as capacious and I have had them overheat and stop working. I am sure all the other solutions have their merits but transferring lots of gigabytes can be a slow, tedious process. Very annoying if it fails and you have to try again because of network related issues.
My friend is now sold on the idea of buying an SSD exernal drive for himself for this ‘backup’ business everyone keeps recommending.
Were they in ITunes? If they were, things could be a bit evil. ITunes, if linked to Apple music, may have decided to delete the files and replace them with links to Apple music copies. This is a really terrible “feature” added to ITunes which is basically broken and causes much grief. If you are outside the USA ITunes will actually delete a CD you own from the library and refuse to play the Apple Music one because you live in a country where Apple don’t have rights to the CD. As much of an Apple fanboi as I am, this behaviour makes me hate them. They could fix it. They know it is broken. But they won’t bother.
This is unfortunately a good point, that might explain why the files did not transfer.
However, if the files are still actually on your old Mac, they are most likely in your Music folder (in /Users/yourusername/Music) under the subfolder iTunes. The simplest way would be to copy the entire Music folder to a USB stick or external drive,* then copy that folder from the drive over to your new iMac. Either copy the subfolders into your new Music folder, or rename the old folder (on the external drive) to MusicOLD (or so) and copy that over in your home directory. Then the files are safe on your iMac and you can figure out how to move them over to the Music app or whatever you use. I think you could drag entire Mp3 folders into iTunes and presumably can do the same with the Music app.
In the iTunes folder you can find all the MP3 files in neat subdirectories (for each CD) with legible names.
a 128 Gb USB stick should nowadays only set you back some $ 30, and is always useful.
I’ve heard of iTunes occasionally barfing on a track ripped yourself with the “this song is not currently available in your country” alert, but I’ve never heard that iTunes then deletes that track. It’s just greyed out and can’t be played until iTunes comes to its senses or a restart or whatever. That still sucks, of course, but it hasn’t been deleted. Can you post a link to a story where tracks actually have been deleted because of this?
No. I read it on some useful forums ages ago. I didn’t imagine it.
I just checked on my current Mac and traversed the entire music file system. There are CDs I ripped that have files (individual songs) missing. There are CDs that are listed in Music with all tracks greyed out that I ripped that have no presence in the file system. There is no way to convince Music to reload them. Some of the deleted CDs don’t even exist in Apple Music/iTunes at all. Didn’t stop deleting the source files.
There are CDs I ripped that have alternative version on Apple Music that are greyed out and with no local files that are available on Apple Music that can be downloaded. Sometimes Music deletes these downloads again and leaves me with the greyed out version.
It is a total mess. Restarting Music makes no difference. Rebooting makes no difference. Sometimes more files vanish. At no time have any files reappeared, and download is always disabled.
I should add. A tune that isn’t available for your region isn’t instantly deleted on detection. But iTunes/Music has a habit of deleting music that has not been played for some time to free space. It does this on the basis that you can get it back again. But it will delete things it won’t put back. So you silently lose things, and it refuses to fix the damage it does.
It also seems to get confused in different ways. The Apple version of a tune might be microscopically different to the one you had on CD. So it refuses to replace the one you had with what it has, even though it deleted your copy. Or for songs it agrees you have the right to listen to it will download its version to sit next to yours.
I suspect whoever posted on that forum ages ago did imagine it. Or they simply deleted their music without realizing it. It sucks, but it happens to the best of us.
I also recall reading about iTunes deleting files from a computer. Didn’t quickly find it, although I did find a story about Apple deleting other music files, which appears to be admitted by Apple:
But it’s not iTunes that’s the source of my problems. I was perfectly happy with iTunes. Ripped almost 2200 CDs with nary a problem. Now, I’ve transferred all my iTunes files to the Cloud (and boy, did that take forever!), then tried to download them into Apple Music. A fraction of them made it, many only partially, and many containing empty folders.
That changes things. If I understand you correctly you stay that you had already deliberately moved the files from your old Mac to the cloud. That may mean that you did not have any (or very few) music files actually on your old Mac.
In that case the tool to mifrate to the iMac did what it had to do.
And your problem seems to be more how to get the files back out of the cloud. That is an entirely different question than the one you started off with.
I may misunderstand the position you’re in, but the information you gave us is insufficient to give further help.
That case (which Apple won) wasn’t so much about iTunes automatically deleting files (because it didn’t, the user still had to manually reset their iPod), it was about Apple trying to protect its own FairPlay DRM scheme from RealNetworks which had cracked FairPlay which would allow music sold from the RealNetworks music store to play on an iPod. Since this only pertained to iPods (I’m pretty sure anyway), anyone who allowed iTunes to reset their iPod still had their song files on their computer and could probably redownload them from RealNetworks. So I don’t think this example really fits the “iTunes deleted my own personally ripped music without telling me” complaint.
I detest iTunes. I used Audion during the PowerPC Mac era.
Now I have my homemade FileMaker database with my 24U SimpleSound Plugin and scripts and layouts to navigate from “CD” (virtual collections, actually) to album to artist to track, and to play a single track or to play all the tracks on the album. It’s a little futzier than ideal to load a new album but not too bad, and it works very nicely as a playback mechanism. it doesn’t make it difficult to associate track names with files at specific file paths, there’s no “manage your music for you” bullshit, and it sure as hell doesn’t delete anything.
All my music is in MP3 format. I don’t do digital rights. No way I’m contending with some electronic nanny thinking I’m not authorized to play that tune because I moved my hard drive and my RAM to a different machine while the other one was in the shop.