Transfer iTunes from external hard-drive back-up to new iPod

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Transfer iTunes from external hard-drive back-up to new iPod

My iTunes music, 40GB of it, is stored on an old iPod Classic, and on a back-up on an external hard-drive of stuff from an old laptop. That laptop died, I bought a MacBook Air 64GB, and of course therefore I can't bring all my music from the hard-drive onto the new Air, because there's not enough memory. Fine. But I want to buy a new iPod Touch, and am a bit lost how I move the 40GB of music I have (ie my whole Libary) onto that new iPod Touch, when it exists in its entirety only on my old iPod Classic and on the external hard-drive back-up, and not on my Air.

The straightforward way, I imagine, would be to drag iTunes Media folder from the hard-drive back-up onto my laptop desktop, then connect the new iPod and manually drop the folder into that, right? But of course there's not enough space on the Air to store that folder while it's being transferred.

Any ideas, please? I hope I have given enough information. If it helps, I'm running iTunes 10.3.1 on the Air.

Thanks. Mike

iPod touch

Posted on Oct 20, 2012 6:16 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

272,881 points

Oct 20, 2012 7:33 AM in response to MikePKenya

Here are typical layouts for the iTunes folders:

If the "whole" library exists on the external drive you should be able to connect to it by holding down Option as you start iTunes, then opening the iTunes Library.itl file on the external.

If, in fact, you only have the media, then read this user tip. You can start the recovery process by creating a new empty iTunes library at the root of the drive, moving the media folder inside it, and importing the media to the library. The user tip should help make sure you don't lose any info when you sync the iPod touch.

tt2

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