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How do I transfer my iTunes music to a different hard drive?

If I transfer iTunes music to a portable hard drive, can I plug the HD into another computer & access my music

  • Pardon my ignorance about computers, but I really have no idea! I backed up my music to a portable hard drive in case my computer fails. How easy will it be to recover the info if need be?

  • Answer:

    very easy. just connect the drive and get itunes or Windows Media Player to recognise your music collection on the drive or copy n paste the music folder on the external hard drive onto your new PC's hard drive If your music collection contains ripped mp3's (copied from cds) youre flying as you can do this as many times as you want to. If they are specific iTunes store downloads then you can do this a maximum of three of five times I think before iTunes copy protection (Digital Rights Management) makes them unplayable, due to current licensing laws. I believe that with some other mp3 download stores (HMV maybe?) they are free of DRM restriction. Dont forget that if you have a DVD burner you can "export library" on Itunes to save your library as a back-up disc onto DVD as well, that you just put into a new computer and iTunes automatically imports this saved and filed library onto a new iTunes jukebox. RECENT UPDATE: Higher quality and DRM-free mp3 downloads are being announced for iTunes! (At Last)!! This means that you can copy and transfer them as many times as you like without restriction- (I hope). I hope that this helps. Goodluck!x

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rob b

Pretty simple and standard. The only issue is that anything that you purchased from the iTunes Music store will require your password and username to play. Otherwise, you can move the hard drive and plug it in on any computer and utilize it wherever! Pretty sweet! Subscribe to my blog : http://mag22-anythingandeverything.blogspot.com/

hoes40

It works ok. My husband and I each had iTunes on our own computers, but have recently bought an external hard drive and transferred/backed up iTunes onto it. Neither of us have had any difficulties accessing our iTunes on our respective computers.

gigspot

Depends, are these tunes you've actually bought from the iTunes Music Store? If so then you're in for a world of trouble if your hard drive ever dies, the copyright protection on these things makes it a right pain in the **** to get them back up and running again because you need to restore your licenses and all sorts of nonsense. Buying music online if basically a mug's game and much more hassle than it's worth, not least because the music you get is sh1t quality compared to a CD. If though these are just tunes you've downloaded from somewhere else or stuff you're ripped from CD then yes, you can copy them anywhere you want and do anything you want with them. They're just music files and it doesn't matter where they came from originally.

Bamba

If you connect the portable to another PC with iTunes, I don't think iTunes will open the files until you input the path of where the music files are located, iTunes Preferences > Advanced > General > iTunes Music folder location. But if you import the files to iTunes from the drive then I think iTunes will open them, not sure on this though. If your PCs hard drive fails then your portable backup won't be a backup anymore, unless you have a backup of your backup. You can backup the data files, not the same as the music files, onto a disc from iTunes and restore them from the disc if you need to. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302392

Elbert

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