Moving your iTunes music from a PC to a Mac

Moving your iTunes music from a PC to a Mac

Source:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ipod-hardware-accessories/49001-how-i-moved-my-itunes-library-pc-mac.html

Posted by: llarrea

Setup:
Latest iTunes Software and iPod" (or iPhone) "update"
My iTunes music was on a removable USB 250GB drive

Steps:
1. Copied iTunes Library.itl, iTunes Music Library.xml and iPod Games Library from MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes to username\Music\iTunes on my Mac
2. Removed the .itl extension from the iTunes Library file
3. At this point you have two options (either leave the music on the removable drive or move it to a folder in the new Mac) I decided to move it to a folder on my new iMac
4. Open iTunes
5. iTunes should open and you should be seeing your library, but with all the songs with the ! sign next to them. This means that iTunes cannot find those songs in the folder they are supposed to be (your PC's path were they were before you moved them). So you need to go to iPod Preferences and under the Advance tab modified the Library location so that it points to the folder where you placed the files on your Mac
6. iTunes will now show a "Updating Library" message while it looks for and finds all your music in it's new folder

At this point I was wondering how should I move my games or if the where already moved along with my music. I looked for answers but found none, so I went ahead and plugged my iPod to my Mac

To my surprise, iTunes gave me a message indicating that there were purchased songs on my iPod that were not on my Library and asked me if I wanted to copy them to my iMac. I replied Yes and everything worked OK: music and games...


Before you try the steps above, you may want to make sure you have your music organized as the site below suggests.

My First Mac - dot come - article