How to move MM Playlist to a Itunes MAC ?

[Emrik]

Hello There,

I'm trying to move all my MM playlist (not the automatics) to my mac so that i can use them again via itunes on my mac. Of course I have already made a copy of my mp3 files & folders in my mac exactly as in my PCs.

Thanks a lot for your help.

PS: the objectif is to use Traktor on my mac to mix with the help on my playlists already made a long time ago on my PC via MM.

[Lowlander]

If paths are the same Tools > Scripts > Export all Playlists. If needed you can always use Notepad (or similar text editor) and it's replace function to quickly update the paths on playlists.

[Emrik]

thanks a lot , this is what i do when i move from one pc to another pc but here i am moving from a PC to a MAC.

on mac there is a "TextEdit" to open the .m3U file but the path are different from Windows to Mac , do you know what i should do to make my MM playlist ready to be open via itunes on a macbook Pro ? (witch of course the same mp3 files copied and the same structure in the folders ).

thanks again.

[Lowlander]

I have no clue how files are stored on a MAC, so I'll give a Windows example and hope you can take it from there.

Say you store you tracks on PC 1 as:
C:\Docs\Me\Music\Artist\Album\Track.mp3

The Artist\Album\Track.mp3 portion will remain unchanged on PC 2, but the path is now:
E:\Music\Artist\Album\Track.mp3

This means in a text editor you'd use the Replace function to replace C:\Docs\Me\Music\ with E:\Music\. Now the playlist will work on PC 2.

I hope this helps, as I don't know how MAC OS stores files.

[Emrik]

thanks for the info this is what i've already done on several pc. I tried something similar on my mac but it doesn't work the same way apparently

[wutzin]

There at two problems you need to solve in order to be able to take your PC playlists from MediaMonkey to your MAC itunes:

1) The location to your files have changed - because your harddrive is not called "C:\". Similarly, the mac also addresses network drives or external usb harddrives differently. Plus, in addition, you might have moved your music collection to a folder with a different name (say, on your PC it was in a folder called "My Music", but now it sits in a folder called simply "Music". So you need to change the path for each playlist entry.

2) The mac uses the forward slash "/" in pathnames, but the pc uses the backslash "\". So you need to replace all backslashes in your playlists with a forward slash.

So your old PC playlist lists files like this:
Z:\Music\Music Chris\Francine Reed\05 Go Tell It On the Mountain.mp3

To be able to import them into itunes, the must look like this:
/Users/Chris/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Francine Reed/05 Go Tell It On the Mountain.mp3

So you need to open all your playlists in a texteditor and run two search-replacement operations:

i) search for "Z:\Music\Music Chris\", replace with "/Users/Chris/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/"
ii) search for "\", replace with "/"

Save as a new playlist and import it into itunes. Done!

I wish there was an automated way to do this (in case you have lots of playlists), but I'm not script-smart enough to do this.
Maybe some day, the MM community will come up with a script that exports the corrected m3u's directly out of MM!

[Emrik]

thanks for the input, I use another method, I took the "grouping" field as a common MM PC & Itunes Mac field and I wrote the playlist name in it thanks to a MM script. Then once in Itunes Mac I used the automatic playlist to gather them again.

[wutzin]

oh, that's an interesting approach - I didn't realize Itunes read the "grouping" field.

I am assuming you use http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=39589 to get MM to write the playlist info into the grouping field.

I want to give this a shot too. So if you start a new playlist in MediaMonkey, you also create a corresponding autoplaylist in itunes.

One question though: if you add a song to a playlist in Mediamonkey, how do you get Itunes to re-read the tags to realize that the "grouping" tag has changed?

[Emrik]

Actually it was a one way ticket move I moved all my library from PC to MAC so I don't use MM anymore, but gosh i wish MM has existed on Mac...one day...