What with Apple’s recent release of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), a number of my acquaintances are moving their data to backup drives, installing Leopard, and attempting to put things back where they once were. A related question that has come up a time or two is:
What’s the best way to put my music back on my Mac?
So let’s review.
If you performed an erase and install of Leopard when you launch iTunes for the first time you’ll see that it contains nothing. To make something out of nothing, follow these steps:
1. Access your backup and locate your iTunes folder.
This is normally youruserfolder /Music/iTunes.
2. In iTunes choose File > Add to Library.
3. Navigate to the location of the iTunes Music folder on the backup drive and click Open.
Again, this is normally found in youruserfolder /Music/iTunes.
iTunes will now copy your music from the backup drive to your Mac’s internal drive, placing the music in the default location of youruserfolder /Music/iTunes/iTunes Music.
4. In iTunes choose File > Import.
5. In the Import window that appears, navigate to the backup drive’s iTunes folder.
6. Select iTunes Music Library.xml and click Open.
This populates the iTunes Source list with all the playlists you’ve created. iTunes may tell you that it can’t find some of content that’s supposed to fill these playlists. Don’t worry about it. When you click a playlist, you should find that it contains the media it’s supposed to.