• If you are a Windows user and don’t want to go through all of this hacking, you can buy iTunes Transfer software at my partner site. It will help you back up your library – with playlists – and transfer it to your other computer.
• If you’re trying to transfer music from your iPod to your computer, unfortunately, Apple won’t let you do this freely, but you can buy iPod to Computer software for PC (free trial download), or iPod to Computer software for Mac at my partner site that will allow you to do this.
• if you just have the hard drive of your old PC, Ben has shared with us how to make the transfer
• if you aren’t keen on messing with XML files – and play count isn’t important to you - Oden has a simple process, involving smart playlists, for retaining song ratings when you transfer your iTunes library.
• Collin has a simple way to find out those duplicate songs that you may end up with when transferring your catalog.
• Aaron devised a clever way to transfer while retaining playlists in your collection.
• If you are transferring between Macs, pbaron has a method involving FireWire mode.

[Original post]

Since I’m moving, I wanted to transfer all of my music from the iTunes library on my work computer to the iTunes library on my home computer. This is pretty simple – just transfer my music from my work computer’s iTunes library onto my Firewire Hard Drive, take it home, and transfer the music onto my home computer – but I rely on all of my song ratings, accumulated over thousands of hours of listening to iTunes while I work, to populate my iPod Shuffle with songs from the “My Top Rated Songs” Smart Playlist. I couldn’t find any information on how to transfer my iTunes music, while still retaining my song ratings, but I finally figured it out.

Move Your Music Library

Before you do this, you’ll have to first transfer the actual files to your new computer. You may choose to burn CDs, DVDs, or use a thumb drive; but using a FireWire cable is easiest for large libraries, unless you have a portable hard drive.

Move Your Metadata

Here’s a video tutorial I put together. Written instructions are below.

1. Export the source iTunes library as an XML file (File>Library>Export Library…). This will create a file that holds information about the location, song filenames, and *song rating*!
2. Replace the file paths in your XML file with the path that the songs from the source library will be in when you import them. This path may point to your FireWire Drive, a DVD you have burned, or a temporary folder on your hard drive that you have copied your music to. Just to be sure of the new path, copy one of the files from this location to your library, export your destination library, and look at the file path to that song in the resulting XML file. To actually replace the file paths, I did a Find/Change in TextWrangler but you can just use TextEdit (Edit>Find>Find…).
3. Set the preferences in iTunes in your source library to “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library.” This is under “Advanced.”
4. Import your library (File>Library>Import Playlist…).
5. Delete redundant files. If you’re like me, you have some duplicate songs in your multiple libraries. This is a tedious task, but I plan to do it over time.

Of course, you can prevent all of this by being organized in the first place. I probably should have just had an iPod that I synched with my home computer and brought to work.

If you need help getting the actual files over to your new computer, this video will show you how to copy your music to your new computer using iTunes Home Sharing:

UPDATE, May 24, 2010: There are tons of comments on this post, so you may want to discuss your iTunes and iPod migration issues on the Transfer iTunes forum.

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1. Move your body: Whether it’s swinging from a pull-up bar during a conference call, or hitting a few yoga poses to start off my day, I’ve discovered a strong connection between my thoughts and my body movement. Dancing, running, walking, playing sports, or just jumping around for no apparent reason are good ways to get your mind thinking differently. When was the last time you did a hand stand? Creativity Bootcamp: Move Your Body
2. Express your thoughts: In any way you can. The most important thing is, minimize friction between your brain, and the medium of expression. If you feel like talking, just pace around and talk, even if you aren’t recording it. And, don’t be afraid to not make any sense. A tiny fraction of what I write or draw ever sees the light of day. Sometimes I’ll just sit and write a string of random words that are on my mind – the next thing I know, that exercise has me writing complete, coherent, sentences that would have never gotten out of me otherwise. When I write, sometimes it’s in a Moleskine with a compressed-felt pen, and other times it’s in one of my favorite apps, VooDoodPad. Creativity Bootcamp: Express Your Thoughts
3. Use your senses: Whatever your core competency, explore other mediums of expression that use other senses. For your ears, take a dance class, or learn to play an instrument. For your smell and taste, take a cooking class, or just experiment in your kitchen. I like to go to a life drawing class once in awhile, and I’m still playing around with the idea of keeping a big hunk of clay on my desk. There might be room next to my LifeBeans. Creativity Bootcamp: Use Your Senses
4. Socialize: With passionate people from all fields. Your brain will light up hearing about how other people approach challenges of their respective crafts. Also, the more you socialize, the more you understand people, and the more people will understand your work. Creativity Bootcamp: Socialize
5. Isolate: If all you do is socialize with passionate people, you aren’t creating much, are you? To really inject your unique perspective into your work, you have to spend some time with your own thoughts. If your profession has a “scene,” try pulling yourself out of it for a bit. Ever seen “Best in Show?” If your life is starting to look like that, maybe you should stay in this weekend. Creativity Bootcamp: Laugh
6. 

   L.O...I have an idea!
   Laugh: You have to have fun, or your work will lose all of it’s soul. Set aside 15 minutes a day to poke around on YouTube if you have to. I like to watch The Office on hulu while I work.
7. Invite Serendipity: Put yourself in a place where something random, yet magical can occur. The general criteria for such a situation is that it be something unfamiliar and full of random stimuli. My two favorites are strolling around the streets of any major city, or wandering around a thrift store. Twitter user stephendavis02 does something similar.
8. Eat right: For me, this means lots of fruits and vegetables (organic when possible), a lot less meat than the average American, and whole grains (brown rice, quinoa). I also try to do a fast one day a month, and it’s amazing what it does for my mood and energy level. The most dramatic effect occurred when I cut out wheat.

So the overriding themes for me are variety, curiosity, and health. What works for you? Tell us and win a book!

—-

Laughing photo by Jim Epler, lights photo by kevindooley.

Related posts:

1. Creativity Bootcamp: Isolate
2. Creativity Bootcamp: Express Your Thoughts
3. Creativity Bootcamp: Socialize

Or, if you don’t have 20 minutes to spare, here’s a SlideShare version, complete with summarized comments:

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Some good reasons to completely rethink goals:

• Achieving goals doesn’t make you happier. Achieving goals can be a bit like eating Chinese food: your hunger is sated for a half an hour, and the next thing you know, you’re hungry again. Your happiness is more dependent upon how you percieve your goals than if you achieve them or not.
• If you achieved it, it was probably too easy. I remember when I was in grade school, they told us to always do the “five finger” exercise when deciding whether to read a book. They told us to read a random page in the book, and count on our fingers how many words were new to us. If it was five, the book was too hard; one, the book was too easy. We could have been encouraged to read books that we could breeze through, but where would that have gotten us? It’s okay to have things you’d like to achieve, but getting too bent out of shape about achieving those things encourages you to set goals that are too easy.
• You can miss the forest for the trees. If you’re too focused on your goals, you can often miss opportunities that are right in front of you. Imagine you’re a monkey swinging through the forest; and you have your eyes set on a bunch of bananas way across the forest. You may have to swing – from branch to branch – across some pretty wide gaps to get to those bananas. But if you’re mindful, you may notice some branches that are a little easier grab that may lead to other, perfectly good, sets of bananas. You may have your heart set on becoming a Partner at your current company, and meanwhile your best friend from B School is begging you to start a firm with him. Everything around you is constantly changing; and altering the priorities of you, and everyone around you. You can’t decide whether to RSVP “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to your friend’s evite for next week’s BBQ, and you think you can plan what you’ll be doing in five years?
• You know what’s good for you better than you think. Why spend your evening working late for your boss when you really want to be writing on your blog? Sometimes our goals come from outside factors that we might not recognize. We might be clinging to a childhood dream about being an astronaut; there may be societal factors that have made us decide it’s prestigious to become a lawyer. We often hold onto goals that aren’t in line with our actual desires, talents, and social context. Do you think there was any kid 20 years ago who wanted to be a Web Designer when they grew up? No, and it’s a good thing that some people didn’t clutch onto their childhood dreams of being artists or mad scientists, because then we wouldn’t have any Web Designers. Constantly asking yourself “is what I’m doing right now in line with my goals?” sounds like a great idea, but it can be destructive. If you listen to your desires, you’ll probably find there’s something at least as beneficial to your well-being – whether you know it or not – that you’d actually rather be doing right now. If you take time to listen to yourself and doing those things, eventually you’ll find yourself being successful at something you truly enjoy, and what could make you happier than that?

So should you just forget about having any goals? Of course not. Just think twice next time you’re beating yourself up for not achieving a goal. Either that goal wasn’t sensitive to your personal situation and desires in the first place, or something has changed about your personal situation and desires that makes it infeasible. Focusing on goals without mindfully evaluating the ever-changing landscape that is your life and your desires is a recipe for misery. If you take the time to ask yourself what it is that you really want, relative to what opportunities lie in close reach of yourself, you may find yourself with a perfectly good bunch of bananas.

Read this post next! Eight Life Hacks for Health Wealth and Happiness
Or, this one! Chinese Food Goals

Photo by Flickr user ppdigital.

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I was once at a party where everyone had the name of a celebrity taped to their back. We all then went around the party, asking people yes or no questions to gather information to guess which celebrity we “were.”

“Am I a male?” “Yes.” “Do I wear a suit?” “Yes.” “Do I live with talking inanimate objects?” “Yes.” “Pee Wee Herman?” “Correct!”

This is usually called an “icebreaker,” but it dawned on me that it’s not so much that this activity broke ice, it was that it made the ice much thinner than it might normally be when talking to strangers.

There’s alot of Ego Capital at stake when first interacting with someone. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Never. How will they interpret your actions and words? What will you talk about? Will your interaction with them be welcome? When there’s an “icebreaker” involved, the answers are: as part of the icebreaker, the conversation pieces provided by the icebreaker, and yes – unless they are a very closed individual. Icebreakers reduce some of the biggest sources of social anxiety in interacting with a new person – the “ice,” if you will.

Successful social media sites employ Thin-Ice Interaction to reduce the psychological barriers to interacting with a new person. Here are a couple of good examples:

Yelp’s “Compliment” Feature

So you’re browsing around to figure out where to go to dinner tonight, and you see a Yelp review that you really like – thus you really want to contact the person who wrote it. Or, maybe there’s – ahem – an ulterior motive. With this feature, not only does Yelp give you a plethora of options for just what to compliment them about (Thank You, You’re Cool, Hot Stuff, etc.), they even present you with a canned message so you can go about doing so without having to come up with something clever.

This make it easy for you to interact with the other user, but it also reduces your upfront investment of Ego Capital – your “out-on-a-limb-ness.” They know they’re receiving a canned message – they’ve probably received a similar one before – so your ego isn’t at as much risk if they would rather not interact with you. Imagine if these canned messages didn’t exist, and you received word-for-word the same thing in the form of a private message – the interpretation of that message would be entirely different, and sending it would involve breaking through much thicker “ice.” Instead, you can break the thinner ice by giving a canned compliment to the other user. If they respond to you, then you can move forward to another interaction layer (messages you write yourself, meeting for coffee, helping them move, etc.).

JDate.com’s “Click” Feature

This is about as thin-ice as dating gets. Remember how people got together in grade school? “Do you like her?” “I like her if she likes me…” Oh, if only you could find out if she likes you before you show your cards and risk rejection. This is just like that.

When you see someone who interests you, you click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” If you click “yes,” JDate will discreetly make sure that person sees your profile at some point. If they click “yes,” you both get a “click alert” e-mail. So, this feature finds out if both parties are interested, without either of them having to deal with that oh-so-dreaded rejection. If only they had this in grade school.

Here’s a couple other examples of thin-ice interaction on successful social media sites:

Facebook’s “poke” feature: Don’t want to send a message? Just poke. The ego of the user can hide behind the ambiguity in the intended purpose of this feature.

Match.com’s “wink” feature: Why spend an hour trying to craft a witty first message when you don’t know if that cutie will respond at all? Just wink to test the waters.

Analyzing this phenomenom makes these features sound like crutches for social degenerates, but really, getting your users to interact with one-another is key to creating a vibrant online community where real relationships are eventually formed.

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And Craiglist works great for alot of things, but let’s say you’re looking for a roommate. First, you’re going to get a shitload of e-mails. Many of those e-mails are going to be totally irrelevant: from incompatible candidates, or people who generally didn’t read your post. You’re also going to get some spammers and scammers. When you finally sort through all of that, you’ll set up some appointments to meet with a few candidates. Many of them are not going to show up at all – they have no prior relationship with you, so there’s no damage to be done to their reputation by just not showing up. If you do finally find someone whom you’re comfortable living with, ultimately, they’re just a stranger – even if you get references, because those references are from strangers.

The problems of a socially “dumb” classified system

The problem is that something like Craigslist isn’t socially intelligent. It’s just a huge sea of anonymous listings. It’s oblivious to your social connections and doesn’t employ current methodolgies for building trust amongst members. With the influx of social networking over past years, people are able to maintain larger and larger networks of friends. It’s not uncommon for someone to have 400+ friends on Facebook. Shouldn’t these social connections be of some use?

Methinks also that as we start to have larger and larger networks of friends, we have less and less time for people whom we aren’t connected to in some way – thus the problem of the Craigslist “flake factor.”

If you’re looking for a roommate, you could let all of your friends know about this by sending out an e-mail to all of them. But nobody wants to be “that guy,” and you’re just being unrealistic if you expect your friends to forward that e-mail on to your friends. The trick is, getting that information in front of your social connections without annoying them.

So here’s a conceptual model of what such a system would look like. People’s needs are ported through a mechanism that understands their social connections. Those needs are then broadcast to those social connections through their “leisure portal.” What’s a leisure portal? It’s the “playground” of the internet. Huh?

The internet’s playground: the leisure portal

People are very protective of their e-mail inboxes. It’s their territory. So when you bug them with something that is irrelevant to them, they take offense.

Imagine you hated playing basketball. All of your friends know that you hate playing basketball. It’s okay to not like to play basketball. But there’s this one friend that comes by your place unannounced and says “hey, let’s play basketball.” and you say “I hate basketball, you know that” and then he says “well, I’m going to play basketball, tell your friends that I’m going to play basketball.” If he did that enough times, he probably wouldn’t be your friend for long. Getting impersonal e-mails from your friends is a bit like that.

So if e-mail is like “your house,” then a “leisure portal” is more like a “playground.” It’s not your home, you’re there in public space by your own volition. To the right of you, some of your friends are on the monkey bars, to the left, some others are playing kickball, behind you, they’re playing red rover, and in front of you, some other friends are playing chess. You aren’t obligated to join any of them, but you’re certainly welcome to – and you can always just go home.

Get it? A leisure portal is something that people come in contact with every day, usually during their leisure time. The technical equivalent of a playground. Something that, when you broadcast to it, doesn’t give your friends a sense of obligation to act, the way that a mass e-mail does.

Right now, the closest thing to a leisure portal on the internet is Facebook’s news feed. Hopefully you aren’t on Facebook trying to get some real work done – you’re just there to kill time and see what’s up with your friends. If you see in your news feed that one of your friends is looking for a roommate, that may be of interest to you. You may be able to help out, or know someone who can help out, but you may not. It’s not likely to bother you.

The plug

Sound familiar? Yeah, this is the conceptual model behind Through a Friend. Right now, Facebook provides the best system for bringing this model to reality. But hopefully it can be scaled up even further at some point.

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After much thought, I have devised an emotion-based rating system. Here it goes:

1-star: Melancholy

These songs are friggen’ depressing, and with no hope of recovery. I was surprised at how few of the songs in my collection really fall into this category, so maybe I need to be more liberal in my categorization. What isn’t a surprise is that most of the songs that fall into this category are either Elliott Smith or Bright Eyes songs: “Angeles” and “Lua”, respectively, for example.

2-stars: Wistful

These songs are actually more depressing to listen to than the 1-star songs because they tend to allude – through lyrics, sound, or both – to things just lost or out of reach. This category seems to be dominated by Stars, Bloc Party, and Arcade Fire: “Lover’s Spit,” “Kreuzberg,” and “Intervention” as respective examples.

3-stars: Stable

Given that most modern music is based on The Blues, these may still be a little depressing, but are generally more soothing to listen to. These songs tend to mix subtle happiness and sadness for an overall “Stable” feel. This is where you start to see some Spoon and The Strokes show up: “Lines in the Suit” and “Automatic Stop,” as respective examples.

4-stars: Cool

Now we get into things that are perhaps danceable and have a generally more active feel. The spiraling bass line and breathy vocals of “Stars and Sons” by Broken Social Scene put that song in this category, and that crazy video-game sounding guitar solo in “Born Under Punches” by The Talking Heads is undeniably “Cool.” “Happy” and “joyous” songs would probably go in this category as well.

5-stars: Indestructible

These are those songs that make you want to dance, run really fast, lift heavy objects, leap tall buildings, etc.. This is where much of my hip-hop collection ends up, with N.E.R.D.’s “Brain” and Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but A ‘G’ Thang” being a couple of favorites; and “Abra Cadaver” (no, not “Kadavy”) by The Hives, and Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” reppin’ other Genres. The ultimate “Indestructible” song goes – of course – to Spoon with “I Turn My Camera On.”

While there may be some criteria – or even specific characteristics of a song – that I point to to justify my ratings, _it’s music_ and thus this rating system is by no means scientific. I may even rate a song “Cool” today and later decide that it makes me feel “Indestructible” – it may depend upon my mood at the moment I rate the song. I have found the mood-based playlists this rating system yeilds to be pretty reliable. Does it work for you?

P.S. If you change computers, you’ll of course need to transfer your iTunes music library to retain all of these song ratings.

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The startups of the late 90′s had the right idea in giving so many things away for “free”, but what they didn’t seem to understand was that if you give your users something, you should in turn get them to do something for you.

del.icio.us

Give your users a way to organize their bookmarks in a loose manner, in a repository where they can access those bookmarks from whereever they have internet access, and they will provide you with a directory that indicates what sites on the web are most important in any given category.

mySpace

Give your users a way to interact with their friends in a dynamic way, open to be discovered by all of the world, and they will provide you with massive traffic that advertisers will clamor for a spot in, as well as personal data useful for marketing.

Google

Give your users an incredibly intelligent search algorithm, and webmasters the world over will develop their websites with this algorithm foremost in mind. Give traffic to the most relevant sites, and they will work hard to create sites with quality content that you can serve relevant ads next to.

Upcoming.org

Give users a way to organize, subscribe to, and share their own calendar, and they will provide you with a directory of all of the events occuring, categorized, and clumped together in categories of interest.

Seeing a pattern here? You give them something, but while they are utilizing that something, they are doing something for you. The internet allows for leveraging the labor of the masses, but they won’t do that work for you for “free.”

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