Back up playlist to external hard disk.

Hello Nomad Drifter,

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

I understand from your post that you would like to export a playlist to an external hard drive and want to keep all the songs in the same order they were in when they were in the iTunes Library. I like having order to my music as well.

This first article has information about the iTunes Library:

About iTunes library files

The iTunes Library.itl file is a database of the songs in your library and the playlists that you've created.

So, the songs and playlists will be saved how you created them and you can move them to the external hard drive using these steps:

Manage and back up your iTunes media library

Best regards.

If you drag a collection of songs from iTunes out to a folder iTunes copies all of the files into one folder using their original file names. Typically you'll see all the track 1s, followed by all the track 2s, etc. If you export a playlist file at the same time then the playlist knows how to play everything in the right order, but that only helps if you're going to play on a device that reads say m3u playlists. (Typically iTunes M3U playlists need tweaking before they work with other software - see LocalizeM3U for a workaround - otherwise it will be looking for the originals, not the copies you made on a different drive.)

If you want the tracks to be in the playlist order when looking at the folder you need to edit the filenames as they are being copied. I don't have quite what you want yet, but I could probably tweak my ExportToFolder script to allow the play order index to be added to the export file pattern. I could probably make it optionally generate an M3U at the same time but that would require a bit more work.

tt2