Sharing music between PC and Macbook… not expecting this to be easy
Hey everyone!
OK I’m going to be as simple as possible.
PC: Use it for downloading music, organising music, playlists. Main source to listen to music.
Macbook Pro: Traktor, Logic, Ableton. Will be using it for making tunes and playing with tunes with my S4.
I use iTunes on both my Windows 7 (also Winamp) and Macbook machines. The Macbook is new and has no music on it. I don’t let iTunes organise my music on my pc. It’s all kept on a separate drive, so E:/Music/ Genre / Artist / Album
I like the genre folder structure as well as the Album Artist / Album structure. This is a must for my PC and has to stay the same.
I need a way to sync my music automatically to my Macbook. Playlists would also be nice but I could live with that if it wasn’t possible.
I get a lot of new music regularly so manually having to select it to copy over is not a option.
I’m after a way to sync my iTunes library from my PC over to my Macbook Pro. Not links to pay software which no one has used. I’m sure someone must have the same dilemma as me
That ways not bad only there would be no playlists and I don’t know how OS X goes about copying. Would it ask me if I want to overwrite all files? Would it be slow checking over 200gb worth of files just to find say 10 new albums? I have never used OS X before so I have no clue here.
iTunes has home sharing which would work only it doesn’t automatically copy over non store bought files which is a shame.
I’ve been doing something similar. Is all your music tagged correctly? I do this very dilligently, so it’s pretty easy to just simply take all my music, drag it into iTunes on the Macbook, then use the iTunes tab in Traktor to sort through all your music and make different playlists on Traktor, or make playlists in iTunes itself. That’s probably the simplest way I’ve found. Also, just make sure not to overwrite anything and you should be fine.
Portable hard drive + Mac Drive or there is a way to format the drive so that both machines can view it I’m not 100% sure which format that is but a simple google search will turn up what you need. That way when you on your PC downloading stuff you simply have the drive plugged in there and then switch it over to your mac when you need it over there.
AFAIK there is no way to manually do this and do it well, especially for a large library. The way i do it is to use library sharing in iTunes. When both computers have iTunes you’ll see the other’s library on the left in iTunes. Click on that and at the bottom select to see only items not in your library. From there you’ll have to drag the stuff you want from the PC library to the mac library inside iTunes. I don’t use the same file structure as you so I’m not sure if this will really work for you or not.
You might want to look into setting up a media server. I’ve though about it, but I’m not sure even that’s the answer with using Traktor and Ableton.
I think this is the best way. I will lose the folder structure on my Macbook but I think that’s OK as it’s not what I use to manage my music. I just need the music on here and Playlists.
My ideal answer would be a small app that runs in the background and when it sees the PC on the network it updates all recently added and changed files to the Macbook as well as updating the playlists.
The one thing I’m not keen on is that iTunes adds all played files to the library. So if I’m browsing samples on my pc it’s going to add them to the library then transfer them across correct? I don’t see why there isn’t a option to add played files to the library.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I just need to rip out the superdrive and replace it with a hdd now (SSD as main drive so not enough space )
Hrmm… did you not see my post or check out arsync? It’s not automatic but it’s as close as you are going to get without buying some dedicated software.
Set your source directory in this case your PC. Set your destination directory in this case your MAC. Select option to unidirectional merge press a button and voila! After you set the preferences all you have to do for future syncs is press one button.
You get to keep your directory tree just as you like it. And you can get your playlists too.
The website is lacking in information. So I’m going to assume the program is based around syncing files. However if I get it to copy the playlists files over they will be pointing to music files which are not there won’t they? I assume a playlist file will have data such as the location of the media. Which would be pointing to a windows drive location and not the OS X location of the music.
You can totally go the command line route, but I’ve found most people prefer a GUI.
And I don’t know enough about the complexities of playlists to say whether or not they will transfer between Windows and OSX. I can see Traktor playlists working but maybe not Ableton? I just don’t know. That is something you will have check per application.
But rsync will let you keep your music directory sync’d and allow you to keep your current directory structure between your PC and Mac as well as playlists and any other files really. If playlists are compatible between Windows & OSX then you will be good to go with rsync.
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