I'm not risking a music library it's taken me 50 years to compile.ĭespite your recommendation to embed beaTunes metadata in the actual music files, you also mentioned that ensuring exact copies of the iTunes library, volume and path names, the beaTunes database, and the music files would also work. Well, you don't have to school this guy on backups - I have several, in rotation, and stored in several physical locations :-). In any case, when manipulating large amounts of files and having beaTunes write results to them, make sure you have a backup, in case something goes wrong. When creating a new iTunes-based collection beaTunes imports as many values as possible from the files (this is only done during the initial synchronization, which is why this takes long). Then, on the Mini, create a new iTunes-based beaTunes collection.
Make sure they are found by iTunes on your Mini. If you do that, you can simply analyze on your MBP, and copy the analyzed files to your Mini. When analyzing tracks in beaTunes you can ask beaTunes to embed all values into the audio files as well (option in the general preferences). Re-creating the same library on a different machine leads to different ids and then the mapping is broken. they do not change between application starts), they are assigned randomly. The reason for this is that beaTunes refers to tracks and libraries by those iTunes given ids. This only happens when you have identical volume names/paths and also copied all the correct iTunes library files (I guess the. In the first case, it's necessary that all persistent ids for library and tracks are identical on both machines. "Transporting" analysis results can happen in two forms: You mention an iTunes-based library, so that's what I assume you're are using. I found beaTunes as a way to get much better results than iTunes "Genius" recommendations - I am already hearing music entirely in my chosen range that I've never heard from my library before!
Almost any trouble is worth it to avoid re-analyzing my entire library in place on the Mac Mini :-(. I am a UNIX hacker from way back in the day, and totally comfortable with a bash prompt, so if there is more involved I'd appreciate knowing the details.
The comment there was that if you are using iTunes-based beaTunes, and use Migration Assistant to move, you'll be fine.įor beaTunes 5, does this still hold true? My media server is an old Mac Mini with a hard drive, plenty fast enough to serve out music via AirPlay, but way too slow to use beaTunes to scan through my 100,000+ songs iTunes library! So I am using my 2017 MacBook Pro with SSD and USB 3 to do the heavy processing (over a week to scan the entire library!), and then want to just copy the results to the Mini.Ĭan I just copy over my ~/Music/iTunes folder to the Mini, install beaTunes, and copy ~/Library/Application Support/beaTunes to the Mini? Reading between the lines, "use the Migration Assistant, things should be fine" tells me it's just a matter of copying all the right files. So I found the Knowledge Base article written for earlier versions, but it only goes up to version 4.