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By Rob, October 7, 2009 8:00 PM

Update: 28/07/2011 – I followed this exact procedure to restore my (Snow Leopard) iTunes library into a fresh installation of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and it worked perfectly.

As I wrote in an earlier post, my iMac recently had a well overdue reinstall of everything. Whilst this is good news for the most part, it does cause problems with things like iTunes. I was particularly concerned about losing my iPhone backups. I needed to get my iTunes library back to how it used to be, including all my preferences, iPhone applications and backups. How do you do this though? The only bit of information Apple provide on their website is how to migrate your data from an old mac to a new mac, when you have both machines available. What if your old mac is your new mac? I didnt want to restore a Time Machine backup, as I wanted to ensure this was a fresh start, and not be bringing a load of stuff over that I wanted rid of. The migration assistant was of no use either.

Google wasn’t much help initially, but I did eventually come across this gem.

Whilst, like Apple, that article does discuss the process of copying from one physical machine to another, the process described works just as well when copying from a backup. In my case, I backed up the entire hard drive contents of my iMac using SuperDuper! before I wiped the iMac clean. So I had every file I’d ever need, including old system files.

A friend of mine recently bought a new MacBook Pro, and asked me how he could transfer his iTunes stuff to it from his G4 iMac. As he was not familiar with the Terminal, or Unix/Linux commands, I gave him an expanded version of the above article. If you’re in the same boat, here is the full process he followed to ‘restore’ iTunes:

Continue reading 'Migrating iTunes/iPod/iPhone from Old Mac (Backup) to New Mac'»

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By Rob, July 27, 2009 6:40 PM

It’s been a while since I’ve had a rant about something on here, but this one has been bubbling for a long time.

I’ve read several articles over the last few months relating to how Apple always seem to be ‘working’ with record labels and movie distributors to improve sales of albums and movies on the iTunes store. Most recently is the news that they may be looking to include better ‘digital booklets’, or some kind of ‘interactive digital booklet’. Now, dont get me wrong, I like iTunes. I regularly buy my music from iTunes, but mostly, it’s just singles, or the odd specially-priced EP. Sometimes even a music video. I’ve not bought a single movie or music album from the iTunes store. I also know that I’m not alone with this. There’s a very good reason I don’t buy movies or music albums for download, and one that Apple (and the record companies/movie studios) seem to be ignoring.

As an example, let’s look at the top 5 albums currently in the iTunes music store:

1. Now That’s What I Call Music!, Vol 73 – Various Artists
iTunes Price: £16.99
CDWOW CD Price: £ 10.99

2. iTunes Price:Lungs – Florence & The Machine
iTunes Price: £7.99
CDWOW CD Price: £6.99 Continue reading 'The (iTunes) Digital Divide'»