I currently have a PC with a ton of music stored on a windows-only external hard drive as well as on my windows-formatted iPod. I am considering buying a Mac notebook for college and the only thing keeping me back is how I would transfer all of my music over from the PC to the Mac. Since my 23 gigs of music are all on the external HD and windows ipod, how would I get the files over to the Mac?

Mac's can mount windows shares...just transfer them over the network if you can't mount the external HDD. I think the bigger question is, is your music in mp3 format or some god awful DRM'd format?

How do I transfer them over a network? Networking is one thing that has always puzzled me. Also, some of the music is protected. Will I still be able to transfer?

You need to setup windows file sharing for the external hdd (or wherever the mp3's are) & then grant read access to yourself (or guest if you can) The Mac's are normally good about displaying all the available shares under 'my network places' or whatever, if not you can just go to Go/Connect to server from Finder & use the 'smb://user:pass@host' syntax like: smb://username:password@192.168.1.100 Then just drag & drop the files. The ipod's music is normally kept under ipod_controls/Music (or something like that), it's a hidden folder, turn on your 'show hidden files and folders' thing to see it. This will probably only work w/ regular mp3's. And yea, if your music is in a 'protected' format then you'll have problems copying it, standard .mp3's will copy fine, but wma's or any crap from itunes probably will not. There's some kinda 'Transfer purchased music' thing in itunes that might help here...dunno, I only use mp3's, hehe. Good luck.

That sounds like it might work. How do I go about setting up windows file sharing for the ext. HD though? I don't even have the mac yet (I might not even bother), but I'd like to know this stuff in advance.

I suppose I could just do a direct connect from the PC to the Mac. It would take a while for the files to travel across USB and then ethernet, but it would work. My problem now is the protected audio files.

Yea you could just connect them back to back w/ ethernet cable & then transfer - but you'd need to manually define the IP address/subnet for each machine cuz it can't do it automagically w/ no DHCP server. You'll need a cat5 cross-over cable though, not a straight-through. If ur DRM music is from itunes, you might also try playfair, I"ve never had to use it, but I've heard good things.