How I export iTunes playlists.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 · 19:16 · 0 comments
Lately, I've been playing around with different Operating Systems on the new PC I built back in April. At first, I installed Mac OS X Leopard. I then tried to set up the machine to triple boot to either Vista or Ubuntu. That didn't work out all too well, and now I'm back on Vista. Since I'm now running the sucker on, "Next-Gen," hardware (PCI Express, Core 2 Duo, SATA, and RAM that isn't old) it's not slow like it was on the Pentium 4 machine. Leopard ran like a fluid dream on my set-up, though.Anyways, the problem I've been running into is re creating all of those playlists I've made in iTunes. If there is a way to export all of that data, back it up, and import it later, I'm not sure. Color me stupid.
My music collection is small. It's roughly 23GB, and it's centralized onto a back-up drive. Meaning that, I update my library on the main computer, then back it up to the external drive nightly. When I transfer to a new computer or repair an old one, the music that resides on the machine gets trashed and replaced with the constantly backed-up/updated library from the external hard drive. It's easier to transfer tunes to other machines without having to deal with networking.
My solution around the playlist problem is to add the title of the playlist to the song's information in the, "Grouping," text field.
An example would be, say, I have a small playlist (which most of mine are) made up of songs that I have put together to go with a story I'm writing. Let's call this story, "Giants." So, in each song that I have in the playlist, I add the word, "Giants," into the Grouping text field. When I transfer my tunes to a new or repaired PC, I create a smart playlist in iTunes that goes like this, "Grouping contains Giants," and a new playlist is made of those songs that have been tagged.
Since my playlists are small, and the track order has been the same for years, it's easy to remember what song goes where. This small solutions prevents the need to re add all the songs to a new playlist.
Now, this isn't the best solution. It might be the stupidest. This is something I started doing recently, and it prevents me from having to Google playlist exporters.