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[BullishDad]

Recently, I purchased a Mac Mini M4 as my primary PC.  I still have my Windows 10 PC (it can’t be upgraded to Win 11) where Media Center 33 resides. Ultimately, I expect to retire the Windows PC.

What is the best way to transfer all my music and library data from the PC to the Mac?

I’m expecting to copy the music files to an external hard drive which I’ll attach to the Mac.  However, there are no letters for hard drives on the Mac, so it would seem that Library Restore would not match the drive. I use many Playlists and want to make sure they will work properly too.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  I’m hoping for a smooth transition so that I can continue using Media Center in the same manner I have enjoyed for many years.

[JimH]

Moving Files topic on the wiki.

[JensWoermer]

Did you get an answer with some advises?
I have the same issue and I didn't find a complete instruction for that problem!

[EnglishTiger]

Rule #1 when transferring anything from a Windows PC to a Mac PC - The disk used for the transfer must be formatted as ex-fat32. Mac PC's can read NTFS formatted discs but can't write to them.

[BullishDad]

Thanks Jim, for pointing me in the right direction.  The RoderickGI post that was linked to was especially helpful.

In a nutshell, here's what I did.  All of my music files were on one drive.

1. Formatted an external hard drive to exFAT.
2. Used Copy and Paste to move all Folders from original drive to the external drive.
3. Made sure Library Backup was saved to external drive.
4. Detached external drive from Windows PC and attached it to Mac Mini.
5. Restored MC Library onto Mac Mini.
6. Used Rename, Move & Copy to to get the Library to point to the correct location.

Select Rename
Uncheck Directories, Filename boxes
Check Find and Replace

In my case, Windows drive was M:
When attached to Mac, I gave drive the volume name "MusicDrive"

Find what: M:
Replace with: \Volumes/MusicDrive/

I suggest starting with one or two files to make sure the change works and you can play the file.  Once satisfied, you can select all and do the rest.

[JimH]

Thanks for the nice instructions.  I added a link from the wiki.