I had a 2015 Macbook Pro for everyday use and an older (2103) Macbook Pro I used for photo storage and my iTunes library. Earlier this week, I got a Mac Mini with a 1TB SSD drive with the intention of combining both machines.

The Migration Assistant program worked flawlessly for the 2015 Mac. The 2013 Mac has really been showing its age and I didn't know if Migration Assistant would work, especially since the photos and music took up a lot of space (my iTunes library is close to 200GB). So, I ended up downloading those items onto an external 500GB SSD drive and then uploading them to the new Mac.

That seemed to go well until I realized that, while the music was there, none of the playlists appeared. I have spent a couple of hours in Apple's forums and, with the way Apple evades pointed questions about playlists, I'm getting the sense that I didn't flub the transfer.

I have a couple of dozen playlists. The "standard" playlists could be recreated, but I also had a lot of "smart" playlists based on ratings, last played, etc.

Is there a way to transfer playlists?

quote:

Originally posted by CoolRich59:
Is there a way to transfer playlists?

On the Mac with the playlists, open iTunes, highlight the playlist, then go to the File menu/Library/Export Playlist. You'll also notice there is an option to Import Playlist. Do this on the new Mac with the ones you just exported.

quote:

Originally posted by henryaz:

On the Mac with the playlists, open iTunes, highlight the playlist, then go to the File menu/Library/Export Playlist. You'll also notice there is an option to Import Playlist. Do this on the new Mac with the ones you just exported.

Thank you! I will give this a try.

The only issue you might have with smart playlists is when I've changed computers, all of my playcounts reset. If that happened, your smart playlists will eventually come back, but there's no way to recover your old play counts if they're erased.

quote:

Originally posted by DanH:
The only issue you might have with smart playlists is when I've changed computers, all of my playcounts reset. If that happened, your smart playlists will eventually come back, but there's no way to recover your old play counts if they're erased.

Yes. Coincidentally, I was just writing a response to that effect.

The smart playlists came through empty. It took me a while to figure out why until I remembered that most of them are based on playcounts, song ratings, etc. that are no longer there.

But, I'm still delighted that I'm able to recover the majority of my playlists. Thank you henryaz!