I’ve spent the late afternoon and all evening concentrating on one problem: restoring my desktop’s iTunes conditions on my external hard drive. This isn’t because I particularly crave my play counts. No, it’s about the playlists. I miss my relaxing tunes and my smart playlists and my playlist containing only geeky songs, and because I still can’t decide what Linux distro to put on my laptop, I’ve been using it with my external hard drive for musical purposes.
iTunes has not taken to the idea too well. Oh, it was okay with just importing music into the library to listen, but when I copied the iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml files over from my desktop, iTunes decided to be a pain. I tried everything the Internet suggested that sounded reasonable: forced iTunes to search for a new library, deleted and undeleted the aforementioned files, edited the .xml file…just about everything. I’m currently re-importing the library the old-fashioned way. iTunes thinks all the files are distinct from the ones with exclamation marks next to them. If I’m lucky I can delete those and still keep my playlists. This means my ratings will be gone, which will be a shame since I actually do listen to the My Top Rated list. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to restore the ratings quickly, but I’m not holding out for that.