Episode: 1898
Title: HPR1898: Free my music!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1898/hpr1898.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:56:24

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This is HPR Episode 1898 entitled, Free My Music.
It is hosted by Alpha 32 and is about 7 minutes long.
The summary is, how I got my music off my Mac and then did my eye dependence.
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Hey there, Hector Public Radio. This is Alpha 32 again.
Today I want to tell you about how I sold a little problem I was having.
It was an issue that kept me from fully switching over to Linux
and stopped using my Mac.
What I want to tell you about is how to get your music off of your Apple computer deal.
And just generally liberate your music from the cold grip of Apple.
I know there's probably an ease of where to do this, but I couldn't figure it out.
If you got a better way, please record a show.
It will help somebody.
So I used the command line to do this because that's more comfortable for me.
If you don't have a term, you have the, if you don't know where the terminal is on your Mac, just use Finder.
The little character, get your eyes, little guy down there on your dock.
He'll help you find it.
So the first thing that I did after getting the terminal jazz, I enabled the root user.
Because on your Mac, just naturally, they don't let you have root.
I guess because they're fragile, screw up their beautiful machine.
It seems kind of, I don't know, not very trusting of them.
Not very cool, in my opinion. But anyway, so to enable the root user, it's kind of a funky process.
Basically from just straight from your desktop, click on your little apple up there in the top left and choose system preferences.
And then from the view menu, the box that pops up there in the middle, you know, of all your settings instead.
Choose users and groups.
Then there at the bottom left, there's the lock, you know, you got to, you got to undo to make any changes.
So go ahead and click on that, enter your password, that little, all that jazz.
Then in the sidebar, there on the left, at the bottom is login options.
Go ahead and click on that.
And then after that, there is an edit or join button at the bottom right in the main area there.
Click on that and then click open directory utility.
And click the lock in the directory utility window.
You are going to have to enter an administrator account name and password, you know, just like you did earlier, you know, authenticating after you click the lock deal.
And from your big menu up there at the top, you know, the whole way they call that like a global menu thingy.
I think unity on Ubuntu has it.
What's kind of steep in my opinion.
That's what took me the longest was figuring out what the heck they met by that because I forgot about the whole global menu thingy.
So, you know, just there up in the top left.
Click edit and then down towards the bottom of the list is enable root user.
So do that, pick your root password, you know, you got to type it twice to make sure you didn't screw anything up.
Click OK.
And you have root.
Now from your terminal, you can just go, you know, switch back on the unique side of your brain.
And, you know, SU enter your password, la, la, la.
And then what I did was I just plugged in an external hard drive and did a CP-R on the directory that had my music in it.
Actually, I had to read in that folder because it was two words with a space in between.
And you guys all know that the command line doesn't like that.
That's kind of crappy.
So I did read in that folder, you know, take out space.
So just do your CP-R to your external hard drive, which for me was like slash Andrew slash media slash iTunes music.
Yeah, and it'll copy all that over to your, your external media.
It sometimes takes a while, you know, I know I had like 55 gigs of music on my Mac.
And I was, this is what, what really kept me from pulling switching to Linux because I really didn't want to lose 55 gigs of music.
Which I had, you know, of course I paid for all that.
So yeah, anyways, once you do that, you know, you've got your full collection there on your, your external media.
And it is yours again to do it as you please within the confines of the license naturally.
But that's a different story.
So that is how to get your music off of your Mac and onto your Linux box.
So go and, you know, follow these instructions if you're having that same issue and then fire up some rush man.
This is Alpha 32 signing off for AgriPublic Radio.
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