Laptop: Migrating Music (29th November 2011)

This is simply the My Music folder on the old PC. Like other folders, I right-clicked it and clicked Sharing and Security. Ticked Share this folder on the network and Allow network users to change my files.

Clicked on Apply so the window would stay open, reminding me to unshare it once I was finished.

On the new laptop I navigated to the My Music folder using Windows Explorer. Right-clicked the Address Bar and clicked Copy address as text. Now I went to the Network section on the left and clicked the old PC. It showed the My Music folder, available as a share. Wewt.

I noticed an album was in the Unknown Artist folder, so I moved it from there to the correct artist folder. I then deleted the Unknown Artist folder. Sharing the folders this way works great, now!

Now I selected all the artist folders whose music I wanted to transfer. This included the My Playlists folder, so we’ll see what happens to that.

From the Edit menu I clicked Copy files to, which displays a small Copy Items window. I clicked the name of the current user and clicked their My Music folder. Clicked OK and it immediately began to transfer 1.35GB, saying About 24 Minutes remaining.

Rather haphazard use of title case and sentence case in Windows 7. I guess that’s an internal squabble. Or just a limitation of the language pack system, the resource needed to translate so much next in so many language and time-to-market considerations?

Speaking of languages, I used that weird menu and selected Options. Went to the Spelling tab and looked through the Languages list. Selected the entry for English (United Kingdom) and clicked Set Default. This made it bold, so I guess that wasn’t the default previously.

Once the files had transferred, I started Windows Media Player 12. Clicked on Music in the left pane and “hey presto!” All my music was there, complete with album art. Yay!

I right-clicked the column headers and clicked Choose Columns. I then unticked the following items:

Those columns are either redundant or aribtrary or just uninteresting to me:

On the last point, as an example, Seventh Tree by Goldfrapp is classed as Rock! Anyway, the important thing is it all worked with no need to use Help or web searches.

(Incidentally, there is no Help menu. That predictable, consistent and oft-ignored feature is now just a white question mark in a blue circle tucked away in the far right of the menu bar.)

  1. Laptop!
  2. Received It!
  3. File Transfers with USB Stick
  4. Full Administrator Account!
  5. Installing Firefox
  6. Installing Games
  7. Reducing Processes
  8. WiFi Gaming
  9. E-mail
  10. Backups, Old & New
  11. Desk Arrangements
  12. Migrating Music
  13. Mobile Phone Archive
  14. Web Developer Setup
  15. Printing
  16. Putting Old PC Out To Pasture
  17. Stopping the Magical Edges
  18. Disk Cleanup
  19. FTPuse Integrates Seamlessly
  20. Laptop Performance