If you are like myself, and have become one with the ways of the iTunes, you may have come across the situation of fragmented libraries. For instance, let's say your main library resides on a desktop at home, while you also have a progressively growing collection on your notebook that you take with you while you travel. Or, you may have your library on your personal computer, while your sibling or spouse has theirs. You may have been tempted to merge those two libraries, but were discouraged by having to plan and implement a process that won't leave you or your music library feeling overwhelmed. This post will suggest one method of successfully and easily combining two iTunes libraries, while keeping both the method and results clean.
The first thing you want to do, is prep iTunes on the computer that you are moving the songs to. Launch iTunes, enter the Preferences, and navigate to the Advanced tab. Make sure you uncheck the boxes that state Keep iTunes Music folder organized and Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library. While this is usually a best practice to follow, we don't quite want iTunes to perform these functions just yet.
The next step is to mount the drive of second computer. There are a few different ways to accomplish this, but that is a topic for another day. Mac-connect.com is a good resource for performing such feats in mixed operating system environments. Basically, you want to be able to navigate to where the iTunes library is stored on the second computer, from your original workstation. Once you have that ability, from iTunes on the first computer, go to File>Add To Library. Navigate to and select, the iTunes Library folder on the second computer. This will add those tracks to your library, but since we unchecked those boxes earlier, the files will not be copied over to the destination hard drive. This gives you an opportunity to sort through the junk.
While in iTunes, go to View>View Duplicates. Presented to you, will be the songs that you may end up with two of, after merging your libraries. Before deleting any duplicates, make sure that they are indeed the same songs, and not just two tracks that share the same name. Another house cleaning step you can take, is to view your entire library in iTunes, and sort by Date Added. This should place your newly added tracks at the top of your list. Skim through them and see if there are any that you don't want to keep.
Once you are finished cleaning up, go back into Preferences>Advanced tab, and re-check those two boxes that we unchecked earlier. Hit OK to apply your changes. Back in your main window, go to Advanced, and select Consolidate Library. This will take all of those files you just added to your library and sorted through, and copy those files to the location of the iTunes library on your destination computer. Be aware that this process may take quite awhile, depending on library size and connection speed. Once all is said and done, your two libraries should be merged and migrated together to live happily on one computer.
Disclaimer: Software has a tendency to be updated over time. Some concepts and menu locations are subject to change.
