In iTunes, I have spent a considerable amount of time changing songs’ lengths in the Options pane of the Info window (Command-I) of each song. I now want to move my iTunes library to a new Mac. What do I have to do to transfer those preferences so that I don’t have to spend weeks adjusting the start and stop times again?

The best bet is for you to transfer your iTunes library to the new Mac with the Migration Assistant. When you first fire up a Mac and it asks if you want to move your data, that’s one chance, but you can also set up the new Mac as pristinely new and use Migration Assistant later. Just launch it from the Utilities folder and tell it what you want to do—you can transfer your library over Wi-Fi, but if both Macs have a FireWire port, it’s much faster to connect them that way and use Target Disk Mode. (Start up the old Mac holding down T, which mounts it as an external drive on the new Mac for Migration Assistant to mine—but Migration Assistant walks you through the whole process.) Migration Assistant doesn’t have a setting specifically for iTunes, but if you migrate your user account’s Music folder, that’ll contain both your media and your library database, which stores those preferences you want to transfer.

Migrate your Music folder to your new Mac. (Which we obviously can’t do here because the MacBook Air is a few hundred gigs light…)

If you’d rather do it manually, first move the files in your home folder’s Music/iTunes/iTunes Media folder from the old Mac to the same location on the new Mac. Then export the iTunes Library database from your old Mac—go to File > Library > Export Library. Move the resulting XML file to the new Mac. Open iTunes, choose File > Library > Import Playlist and select that XML file.

Why not use Home Sharing within iTunes, you may wonder? I found out the hard way when recently combining songs from multiple laptops and external drives into one, new, started-from-scratch mega-library on my new iMac: Home Sharing is great for actually moving music, videos, and apps from one machine to another over the network, but it doesn’t move the metadata. My ratings and play counts were wiped out.

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