Transferring iTunes Content

Finally, it has been nearly five years, and I have a new Mac. I was feeling left behind, and also fortunate to have made it that long without Apple completely dropping support for the PPC platform. I was also getting tired of looks and questions every time I would bring my little 12" G4 MacBook out. So now I have a snazzy new 15.4" Pro with 4G or RAM, a 320GB HD, and the 2.66Ghz Intel core duo processor. Woo hoo!

My first task was to transfer over my iTunes library, which currently is 35.28GB of movies and music that will only be getting larger as time goes on. So I though I would give Apple's Migration Assistant a try, but to my dismay this tool is more about transferring your account than the files it contains. I am one of those people who views buying a new machine as a chance to correct bad choices and errors you have made in the creation and management of your old account, so transferring that account to my new machine was not what I wanted to do. Specifically, OS X has this horrible miss-feature of creating the 'short name' (the real account name if you are a POSIX geek) for your account by simply concatenating your 'user name' together. An example would be a user name like 'Jonathan Longname' would become the short name 'jonathanlongname'. I don't know about you, but before I knew what I was doing I though that this was okay, then when I starting doing more IT and programming work I got really tired of typing all of that. In some circumstances it can make login into other remote POSIX systems more difficult, if a savvy SysAdmin gives you the user name jlongname, when the two account names don't match.

There is a way to change your short name on OS X without having to destroy the account, but I've only done that on a work only machine that had no important or valuable personal information on it. I did it using the 'NetInfo Manager' utility OS X had before Leopard, but has since been dropped, and a quick sudo mv, and sudo chmod -r command to make the new account name and home directory line up. But on my personal machine I just never bothered and or wanted to take the risk of figuring out how to do this after I installed Leopard.

I corrected this little issue when I created the account on my new machine but low and behold when I went to use OS X's Migration Assistant to transfer the contents of my old account it complained that the short names did not match. I quickly quit and decided to use rsync instead, a simple

rsync -r @

:Music/* ~/Music/.

did the trick with about 6 hours over my home wireless network. Once this was done I just opened up iTunes, and everything worked like a charm (I did not rsync my music library over as iTunes but trans_iTunes, and then held down the alt/option key while starting iTunes to select a library). This also has the added advantage of not having to re-sync my iPod to this new machine, all I had to do was authorize this new machine to play my music, and I got to keep my play counts and playlists.