Dualbooting Vista and XP: the iTunes problem

[Shadow Conception]

Alright, so here's my situation.

I am currently in the process of switching over to Vista from XP. My computer dual boots XP Pro and Vista Business. My iTunes installation is on my XP partition. This installation also includes all settings for my iPod, such as the "Recently Added" playlist and stuff.

My beef is, if I were just to install iTunes on Vista and stick all my songs in the library again, and then connect my iPod, I'd lose all my old settings (play count, recently added, etc). In addition to that, it'd spend half the day erasing everything on my iPod, and then reuploading everything back onto it. This would ALSO result in every single song on my iPod being added to the "recently added" playlist, which is pretty undesirable.

Is there a way to keep all old settings and such intact while switching over to a new operating system?

Edit: Also I forget to mention, all my music is on the E: drive, which is accessible by both Vista and XP. So I don't think there's a need to transfer any music.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: Shadow Conception
Alright, so here's my situation.

I am currently in the process of switching over to Vista from XP. My computer dual boots XP Pro and Vista Business. My iTunes installation is on my XP partition. This installation also includes all settings for my iPod, such as the "Recently Added" playlist and stuff.

My beef is, if I were just to install iTunes on Vista and stick all my songs in the library again, and then connect my iPod, I'd lose all my old settings (play count, recently added, etc). In addition to that, it'd spend half the day erasing everything on my iPod, and then reuploading everything back onto it. This would ALSO result in every single song on my iPod being added to the "recently added" playlist, which is pretty undesirable.

Is there a way to keep all old settings and such intact while switching over to a new operating system?

You should be able to copy the whole iTunes folder from XP, and I mean all of it... not just the music, but make sure you get the iTunes Library.xml file and all that.

Install Vista, install iTunes, launch iTunes, quit iTunes, and now copy all the files back. Relaunch iTunes and all of your stuff should be there.

IMPORTANT!!!
Make sure that before you delete XP you have de-authorized your iTunes account for all of your purchased music. You can only authorize 5 machines, and they can only be bulk deauthorized once a year.

 

[Shadow Conception]

So I just opened up iTunes again and... everything is there; identical from XP, with all play counts and everything intact. I'm not too sure how that happened, but I'm liking it.

Now to do the same for WMP; it's my main media player. I only use iTunes for my iPod.

Thanks a bunch for your help!

 

[iLEktron]

Hi, may I please suggest something.
There is a program out there called Floola, it is freeware application which can manage your music, videos, pictures and more..... You do not need to install itunes in order to use Floola. You can add/delete music at any time, its portable so you can even put it on your ipod, plug it in over at your friends house and synchronize.

Here is a link for you.
http://www.floola.com/modules/....php?page=download_win

 

[Buddyd]

you could also store your itunes folder on an external drive and either hold control or shift forget which key it is and launch itunes and it will ask for the library file you would like to load. Then just browse to the xml file on our external drive and it will continue to use that as the default.