94. Back Up Your Music to CD or DVDBEFORE YOU BEGIN 35 Create a Smart Playlist 52 Create an Audio CD from a Playlist 53 Customize CD Burning Options SEE ALSO 96 Restore Your Music from Backup 97 Restore Your Music Library Database from a Backup Copy One of the most straightforward ways to back up your music is using iTunes itself and choosing to burn a series of data CDs or DVDs of a selected playlist ; all you have to do is make a playlist of all the music in your library and then make sure that you have enough blank CDs or DVDs to hold all the files. TIP A recordable CD holds 650 or 700 MB of data; a recordable DVD holds 4.7 GB. Use the readout at the bottom of iTunes' Library view to see how big your music collection is and calculate how many blank discs you'll need to have handy. You'll want to perform this backup task on a regular basis, at least once a monthand particularly after you go on a buying spree and add a lot of new tunes to your library. Although backing up your music library might eat up a lot of blank discsand cost you several dollars and a lot of time and clutter each time you do itno doubt you'll agree that the value of restoring a thousand dollars' worth of purchased music from your careful backups is abundantly worth the initial hassle. NOTE Backing up your song files (and other materials downloaded from the iTunes Music Store , such as digital booklets and music videos ) preserves all the info tags embedded in the files themselves but doesn't save external song data such as equalizer settings, start and end times, and the Date Added, My Rating, Last Played , and Play Count fields. It also doesn't save your playlists. To preserve this information, you must back up your iTunes Music Library file, as shown in step 5 of this task. Refer to 97 Restore Your Music Library Database from a Backup Copy for information on restoring your iTunes database file and the irreplaceable information in it.
NOTE Refer to 96 Restore Your Music from Backup for information about restoring your music files and to 97 Restore Your Music Library Database from a Backup Copy for restoring your personalized information from a preserved iTunes Music Library file. Insert a writable CD into your computer's CD drive. Choose to open a writable CD window for copying files to be burned. This option varies according to your operating system: In Windows, it's Open writable CD folder using Windows Explorer; on the Mac, it's Open Finder . (You might have to double-click the disc's icon to open its window.) In a second Windows Explorer or Finder window, navigate into the iTunes folder in your My Music or Music folder. Select the iTunes 4 Music Library.itl and iTunes 4 Music Library.xml files and drag them into the writable CD window. When the files are copied , burn the CD by choosing File, Write these files to CD (in Windows) or by clicking the Burn button below the window's title bar or in the sidebar (on the Mac). The database files are burned to the disc. Eject the disc, label it, and store it along with your backup discs of the music files. NOTES The iTunes 4 Music Library.itl and iTunes 4 Music Library.xml files contain identical information and are updated simultaneously with every change you make. Technically, you need only one of these two files to restore your iTunes Library fully, but the files are quite small and there's no harm in preserving both. In Windows, you might have to turn off the Hide file extensions for known file types option (choose Tools, Folder Options and then click the View tab) to distinguish between the two files. On the Mac, the iTunes 4 Music Library.itl file appears simply as iTunes 4 Music Library . |