As part of my "IT infrastructure" refresh, I have an iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone and an iPod. Wouldn't it be nice to keep all this synched and backed up without a thought? I bought a DLink DNS-323 with 2 x 1TB drives in RAID1 for $520 at ATIC to house everything in one place and provide backups.
One challenge was how to convert all my playlists from Windows Media into iTunes? It was pretty straightforward once I rediscovered my unix shell and perl hackery days of 13 years ago (yes, I did use sybperl cgi with mosaic back in 95).
You have to do the manual work of saving all your playlists as .m3u files. How to convert wpl to m3u is an exercise for the reader. Then you need to convert your directories from the PC to the Mac, and convert the "\"s into "/"s. Tres easy avec son Mac.
Many of my playlists used relative paths so they had "..\Indie" and I had all my music on C:\MP3 and D:\MP3. My DNS-323 has the imaginative name of "/Volumes/Volume_1/Music" for all my music.
Skipping the C:\MP3, I converted the relative and absolute paths using the Mac's Unix shell in the directory of my .m3u files
perl -pi -e 's/\.\.\\/\/Volumes\/Volume_1\/Music\//g;s/D:\\MP3/Volumes\/Volume_1\/Music/g;s/\\/\//g;' *.m3u
Then I just imported the M3U files.
If you also did a revamp of your directories, perl can help with that too. I decided to have a Indie (for mellow), and Indie(Rock) folders. Two examples are St Etienne and the Bravery. For the ones I wanted to move, like the gorillaz and the white stripes
perl -pi -e 's/Indie\/gorillaz/Indie\(Rock\)\/gorillaz/g;s/Indie\/The White Stripes/Indie\(Rock\)\/The White Stripes/g' *.m3u.
To keep my machines synched, I have the master ITunes folders on the shared drive and then I manually replicate to each computer. ITunes even handles synching my iPhone perfectly on either iMac or MBP. I haven't yet tried to have each computer use the shared drive's ITunes folder as I'm worried about access collisions but I'll try it soon.
One challenge was how to convert all my playlists from Windows Media into iTunes? It was pretty straightforward once I rediscovered my unix shell and perl hackery days of 13 years ago (yes, I did use sybperl cgi with mosaic back in 95).
You have to do the manual work of saving all your playlists as .m3u files. How to convert wpl to m3u is an exercise for the reader. Then you need to convert your directories from the PC to the Mac, and convert the "\"s into "/"s. Tres easy avec son Mac.
Many of my playlists used relative paths so they had "..\Indie" and I had all my music on C:\MP3 and D:\MP3. My DNS-323 has the imaginative name of "/Volumes/Volume_1/Music" for all my music.
Skipping the C:\MP3, I converted the relative and absolute paths using the Mac's Unix shell in the directory of my .m3u files
perl -pi -e 's/\.\.\\/\/Volumes\/Volume_1\/Music\//g;s/D:\\MP3/Volumes\/Volume_1\/Music/g;s/\\/\//g;' *.m3u
Then I just imported the M3U files.
If you also did a revamp of your directories, perl can help with that too. I decided to have a Indie (for mellow), and Indie(Rock) folders. Two examples are St Etienne and the Bravery. For the ones I wanted to move, like the gorillaz and the white stripes
perl -pi -e 's/Indie\/gorillaz/Indie\(Rock\)\/gorillaz/g;s/Indie\/The White Stripes/Indie\(Rock\)\/The White Stripes/g' *.m3u.
To keep my machines synched, I have the master ITunes folders on the shared drive and then I manually replicate to each computer. ITunes even handles synching my iPhone perfectly on either iMac or MBP. I haven't yet tried to have each computer use the shared drive's ITunes folder as I'm worried about access collisions but I'll try it soon.
Leave a comment