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copying itunes library to hard drive issue

I'm trying to copy my entire itunes library on my office iMac (OS 10.6.8 / 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo / 4 GB ram / iTunes 11.4) to an external hard drive that I can then plug into my Mac Mini (OS 10.9 Mavericks / 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo / 4 GB ram / iTunes 12) at home that I'm using as a dedicated music server. The Mini is configured to use the external hd for the itunes library.


I copied the iTunes folder to the hard drive (after consolidating files) and everything appeared to transfer over. I use a headless Mini and control iTunes via the remote app on my iPhone. The issue is that a third or more of my library seems to be missing, and album art that I've updated in iTunes on my iMac is not appearing in the transferred library. Some music won't play because "the original file is missing."


Is this happening because the iTunes versions are different on each machine? I can't upgrade iTunes on my iMac until I upgrade my OS which I'm not doing yet out of fear that older peripherals will no longer work. Any idea what's going on? Thank you!

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), Mac OS X (10.6.8), Safari 5.1.10

Posted on May 6, 2015 2:28 PM

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3 replies

May 6, 2015 4:05 PM in response to wigglyman

Probably all kinds of the going on here but I won't go into detail because what you want to do won't work. A library file gets upgraded to the most recent version of iTunes used by it and won't be opened by an earlier version. The only thing you could do would be to keep media stored on the external and use two different library files which will be a real pain because then you are doing parallel management of playlists, things added by one library and not the other, things renamed in one library suddenly being not found by the other etc. Well, I guess you could downgrade iTunes 12 to iTunes 11 so both run the same version.

May 6, 2015 4:32 PM in response to Limnos

Thank you Limnos. The thing is that I'm not using the external hd as the library file for both machines/versions of itunes. I'm copying my main library (on my iMac's internal hd) to the external and only using that library with the Mini. So it shouldn't matter if the more recent version of iTunes on the Mini upgrades the library file, because I'm not attempting to then go back and use it with the iMac's older version, right?


BTW, this actually worked fine for awhile. When I would add new music to my iMac master library, I would replace the previously copied library with the updated one. Everything initially appeared on the external hd updated. But now that's not happening. Ran disk utility on the external hard drive to see if there was any data corruption and no issues came up.

May 6, 2015 8:59 PM in response to wigglyman

It should work. As far as I know there has not been any difference in iTunes' basic operation since it was first brought out. I am not sitting watching what exactly you are doing but if in theory you wiped the external drive, copied the library (iTunes folder) 100% from the internal to the external, then started the mini's iTunes with the option key held down and selected the library on the external it should look pretty much identical to the iTunes 11 version with the exception of changes made in display, etc. between the versions.

copying itunes library to hard drive issue

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