Moving Itunes playlists and music

Take the hard drive out of the old computer, install it in the new computer, then copy & paste the contents of your library into the new computer's hard drive. I'm not sure which file contains the playlists for you to copy over, but you can, from the old iTunes, export all your playlists as XML and import them into the new iTunes to gain full function.

My only concern is that it appears iTunes doesn't like when you move protected songs (bought in the istore) to a new computer so much.

is it possible to set up a different path for itunes on the new computer than the old computer? say, change the C drive on the old computer to the E drive on the new computer?

The easist way is fairly easy as long as you use an NTFS file system and know how to use the command prompt. I don't know if anyone here has tried this but I have and it works perfectly. A while ago I found a sysinternals app called "junction" and it has some powerful and hidden NTFS capabilities. What I did was re-route the folder where iTunes looks by default which is "C:\Documents and Settings\Mario\My Documents\My Music\iTunes" and have it pointed to "G:\iTunes db" on my system. This way, iTunes is none the wiser and still looks where it always will but nothing is really on C: but rather on my G drive.

What I did was close itunes, and move the contents on the iTunes folder to "G:\iTunes db" or the taget directory. Then I ran junction from the command prompt and executed the following command:

junction "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\" "G:\iTunes db\"

Special note about the command: Just make sure you put the path in quotes because otherwise it won't recongnize the path due to the long files names - this is a DOS program. Just replace my "G:\iTunes db\" target folder path with your target folder path instead.

At that point both folders became virtually the same place. I like doing things this way better because I store no valuable files on the C drive other than my OS in case it gets corrupted and I have to format the drive.

Here is how the app works; I copied it from the junction help file:

Win2K's version of NTFS supports directory symbolic links, where a directory serves as a symbolic link to another directory on the computer. For example, if the directory D:\SYMLINK specified C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 as its target, then an application accessing D:\SYMLINK\DRIVERS would in reality be accessing C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. Directory symbolic links are known as NTFS junctions in Win2K. Unfortunately, Win2K comes with no tools for creating junctions - you have to purchase the Win2K Resource Kit, which comes the linkd program for creating junctions. I therefore decided to write my own junction-creating tool: Junction. Junction not only allows you to create NTFS junctions, it allows you to see if files or directories are actually reparse points. Reparse points are the mechanism on which NTFS junctions are based, and they are used by Win2K's Remote Storage Service (RSS), as well as volume mount points.