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General discussion

Combining iTunes libraries?

Feb 9, 2010 5:36AM PST

Hi all, looking for some advice/help with this issue:

I have a WinXP machine and my iPods are synched to it with my music collection. My partner had a Win Vista Home Premium machine with all of his music on it. (Stored on the local HDD on both.)

The Vista laptop died (motherboard issue) but I've been able to save the HDD.

Now I'd like to migrate both collections to a shared external drive and combine them into one library. Is this possible and if so how?

Thanks for any help!

Discussion is locked

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easy
Feb 10, 2010 12:13AM PST

Just copy all the music and video and whatever else to one folder on your external drive, then (and this is probably the easiest way) uninstall iTunes, then reinstall it. When it's done, first tell it that you want to organize your music yourself when it asks and authorize the new install by putting in your iTunes username and password so you won't have any DRM trouble. Then click import, choose the folder on the external drive, and import all your stuff. It might take a while if you've got a lot of music.

It SHOULD retain all album artwork, but I cannot guarantee it. I've changed music from computer to computer before and it always kept the artwork, but you never can tell.

Good luck with that.

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Thanks
Feb 10, 2010 11:33PM PST

d-adams, thanks for the advice. Follow-up question - the two sets of libraries I am combining include two different iTunes accounts, mine and my partner's. Any idea what complications I'm going to run into?

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reply
Feb 13, 2010 10:45AM PST

I am not sure if it's possible to authorize a computer to use multiple iTunes accounts. So, you might have to sign into a different account in order to play music that wasn't bought using your original account. As I say, I've never tried this before, so I can't really predict what would happen. It's possible that, once you put in the other iTunes p/w to play a song, it will have both accounts saved. On the other hand, you might have to type in the account name and p/w every time you play a different account's song. This is why I refuse to buy DRM'd music; CDs are much easier!

Anyway, glad I could help a little.