Sunday, July 03, 2005


Back up your tunes, suck in that gut, etc.


In a recent podcast, a guy complained (damn non-internally-permalinkable things — fix that!) that a big problem with the iTMS is that the files are locked to a given computer and that, if that computer takes a dump, you’re screwed. He complained that Apple makes it too hard to back your songs up.

For all the complaints one might have about Apple selling DRM’ed music (and I have some myself), the idea that the songs are “too hard” to backup isn’t a valid one, IMO, since all the tools necessary to do the backups are built into the application, and they’re not hidden, either.

Really, there are only 2 steps to backing up your music —

  1. Creating a smart playlist

    iTunes smart playlist creation window

  2. Burning it to a disc disc burning button. You probably want to make sure iTunes is set to make a data CD/DVDthe relevant app text, rather than an audio CD.

You now have an ISO-formatted CD or DVD that you can place in a media safe, a safe-deposit box, mailed to your nephew, or whatever. None of this is hard.


:: Dave Walker 15:30 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags:

:: Comments (2)

Comments:

ssp wrote:

Title: Pedantic

Date: 7/3/2005 19:58:58

Response:
As far as I can tell there's only a single step as users of iTMS will automatically have a list with all the songs they bought in their source list. This can also be burnt. Additional advantage: No localisation problems. I doubt that your smart playlist will still work after changing your preferred language. While all this is easy, my idea for this task was using Spotlight. But that just doesn't work: You can't have a folder which is a smart folder and a 'burn folder' at the same time.
d.w. wrote:

Title:

Date: 7/3/2005 22:48:02

Response:
The prebuilt "Purchased Music" folder didn't work for me, because it only includes songs you've bought on that particular machine (actually, with that particular installation of iTunes). I've actually purchased tracks on 3 separate computers, but I've consolidated my library on a single machine now. Being a typically monolingual yank, I hadn't really thought through l10n. :)



A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet golden treasure inside is hid. -- J. R. R. Tolkien