Transfering My Music

So I'm getting a new computer soon, and I want to transfer over my music (as well as other stuff) and I want to know what's the best way to do it.

Physically, I'm just going to hook up the new one to my network and transfer the files over through my router. However, a lot of sites talk about transferring over Itunes databases and stuff, which seems like too much work. Basically, I plan to just copy the folders containing my music over, then installing Itunes again, and putting the folders into it. I don't really care about keeping my play count or having to resynch my Ipod, but I'm worried that I may have to re-ad my Album art and rename a bunch of stuff. Is that data saved into the mp3 itself, or will I have to include something else from my current Itunes to keep those?

Just buy an 8GB flash drive (if you need a larger one, then you can buy one up to 64GB iirc), copy and paste all your music onto it from your old computer, take it out, plug it into your new computer, copy and paste all of them onto it and then voilà.

Yeah just buy an external hard drive, DVD, or flash drive... transfer the music to it... transfer it to PC... simple.

The problem isn't getting it over, I'm just wondering If it will keep the Album art and Artist/album info and so on.

I see absolutely no reason why it wouldn't. I thought that information was "hard coded" into the file itself?

That's what I was thinking too, but in the case of older CD's before the whole mp3 revolution, don't have anything besides the track number. But I guess if you add them manually with itunes or wmp, they will be added to the track itself and not just the file within your Itunes playlist or wherever. Thanks.

If you have sorrow's furnace, you will not be able to validate your lic.

Why r u sayin dis
I dun get it

I think its in response to DirectSong plug ins for Guild Wars which add additional music to the game as you move from area to area. DirectSong files are .wma files though and you can save their licenses to a location of your choice through windows media player (don't ask me how, I did it once a long time ago).

Back on topic though, information about the album, artist, year, genre etc are usually saved in the MP3s themselves in what's known as tags. There are two formats, v1 and v2 and unsurprisingly v2 contains a lot more stuff. v2 also allows you to add what's known as frames to your mp3 which is where the album art is embedded.

Now this is all if its been done properly. Some systems just put the album art in the folder that the music is in and use whatever is in the folder as album art. Music players then fake about the art. I'm not sure what iTunes does as I stay away from it as far as I can, so you'll need to investigate that yourself. You can check this by turning on hidden files on your music directory(ies). If you don't know how to do this search google as the procedure is OS specific.

A good tool if you're playing around with mp3s and one I use for my radio stuff is MP3 Tag Studio. Its 100% free and allows you to do basic and complex stuff like changing from one file naming format to another, mass tag albums, changing embedded art etc. . Get the beta version if you're using Windows 7, the normal one won't work on it.

Hope this helps

Mp3's store album art, etc., in the mp3 file itself, but I'm not sure about actual iTunes files (m4a). There is an "Album Art" folder under iTunes and I'm not sure what happens if you simply copy it over to a new computer - it seems to contain a "library" file, not individual album arts.
It might be best to copy it to a different folder and then have iTunes add that folder to it's library. Or, better yet, have iTunes "import" the music from the other storage device.

Do this - that's what I've done a few times for clients who wanted to transfer their itunes over to a new pc and it worked for me.