Antiquated transfer problems

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Antiquated transfer problems

So I have an interesting and very antiquated problem. Recently I was digging around in my basement when I found Powermac 3,5 with Mac OSX 10.4.11. I powered it up and found a giant collection of family music (The iTunes is 9.0.2). I want to transfer these music files to a flashdrive and onto a new computer.

I spent a few hours dragging songs (100 or so at a time) and copying them to a flash drive. This method was working very well but then mysteriously stopped working. About 2000 songs in, iTunes stopped letting me copy any more than 1 song at a time. If I try to copy any more than 1 song at a time, is makes a placeholder file (a blank white file), thinks for a second, and then deletes all the placeholder files.

Things I've done to try and fix it:

I've restarted the computer and restarted Itunes a couple of times. Nothing seems to happen.

I've removed the flashdrive copied the songs onto my new computer, deleted the old songs, and tried again. I could copy up to about 6 songs at a time. But soon was reduced to going 1 at a time

I'm not much of a mac user so if anyone knows of something obvious i'm missing, that would be great.

PowerMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Aug 31, 2015 11:45 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

richard grant

Level 4

2,929 points

Aug 31, 2015 1:18 PM in response to zymandias

Hi zymandias,

An alternative way to do this would be to leave iTunes out of it, and drag the music files (and the folders they're stored in) directly from the computer onto the flash drive.

First, to find them: I can't remember exactly what the normal filing scheme was in that era, but most likely the files are in Music / iTunes in a subfolder called something like iTunes Music. As a shortcut, you can simply select any track in iTunes and type Command (the cloverleaf symbol)-R, or go in the menu to File > Reveal in Finder (or Show in Finder). This will open a Finder window and show you the location of that particular file. From there, you can work your way up the file hierarchy to find the parent folder containing the entire music library.

If the flash drive is big enough, you could drag the entire folder onto the flash drive. Most likely, I guess, you'll have to do it in batches. But in any case, this should get around whatever quirky behavior iTunes is exhibiting.

What a cool discovery, all this old family music!

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Answer 2

Limnos

Level 10

411,259 points

Aug 31, 2015 2:09 PM in response to zymandias

Try doing a direct Finder copy as richard grant suggests.

Is the copy process always hanging for the same files? It could be the drive is damaged and the computer is repeatedly trying to re-read it. No solid evidence but I think that happened to me once with a drive I didn't use in a long time.

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