TUAW Tip: Copying to iTunes

This tip might seem obvious to some, but I had a friend (a part-time switcher who bought a Mac mini last year) try to copy "Battlestar Galactica" episodes from his PC to his Mac mini. His solution was to manually copy the file from one Music Library to the other, then double-click the file on his mini to play it in iTunes, which logically added it into his Library properly. There is an easier way! Let's make iTunes do our dirty work for us, shall we?

First, it helps to have the other computer in your network. In fact, you'll want to mount the drive with the music or videos on the Mac you want to copy them to. So if you have a Mac mini in your living room, and you want to move content to your iBook, you'll need to mount the mini's drive onto your iBook. Ars Technica has a good walkthrough of the process (scroll down to the Networking section). If you need to connect an XP machine to your Mac, Apple has instructions here.

Once you've put that other drive on your local machine, fire up iTunes. The defaults should be set to always copy songs into your local Library. This makes sense, as you might carry a song on a memory stick, and want to copy it over. If it didn't copy, once the stick was gone, the song would be gone. If you want to make sure you've set iTunes to copy, go to your Preferences in iTunes (Cmd-comma is the shortcut), Advanced, and open the General tab. There's a checkbox, "Copy files to the iTunes music folder when adding to library."

To add (and copy) the song, go to File, Add to Library... (the keyboard shortcut is Cmd-O). Navigate to the other Mac's drive, into the Home folder of the user with the song you want, and go to Music, iTunes, iTunes Music. Inside that folder are all your songs arranged by artist. Now just select the folder or songs or videos you like, and iTunes will copy them over. You can unmount the drive and play the content on your machine.

Yes, I know Front Row avec Bonjour solves some of these issues, as you can stream content easily. Yes, I know this isn't the most elegant solution, and for always-on networks you could just as well not copy the content over. What I like to do is move stuff around between my desktops and laptops, so it works quite well. I might record a show using EyeTV on my Mac mini, add it for archiving on that machine, but later add the shows I want on my iBook for travel.