Transferring iTunes tracks to SD cards

By Jesse Hollington @jhollington ● Friday, March 6, 2009

Q: I have the majority of my music stored on iTunes. When I want to burn a CD that works fine, but I would also like to be able to write to a device other than a CD burner. My particular requirement is to be able to write to a Sandisk memory card because my new car has 2 SD slots and I have two 16 GB cards that I would like to fill. I can do it from Windows Media Player - it recognises the SD cards, but most of my music is stored on iTunes. Any alternative suggestion other than re-loading all of my CD library onto WMP will be appreciated.

- Jim

A: iTunes does not provide any specific ability to “burn” your media to devices other than CD, however this is simply because no special features are required to accomplish this; While audio CDs use a special format that requires specific “burning” software, media cards normally simply require the raw files themselves to be present on the device. Windows Media Player’s “support” for this feature is actually just a file copy tool.

Therefore, all you really need to do is copy the files onto your SD cards using Windows Explorer. Although you can do this simply by going into the iTunes Music folder with Windows Explorer and tracking down the files, iTunes itself has a often missed feature that makes this even easier, particularly if you’re trying to copy a playlist of files from several different artists or albums.

You can copy tracks directly from within the iTunes application to any other folder on your computer simply by dragging and dropping tracks from the iTunes window to a Windows Explorer window. Multiple tracks can be copied by highlighting them first and then dragging and dropping the group.

So in your case, simply create playlists of the tracks that you would like to transfer to each of your SD cards, open a Windows Explorer window to the specific removable drive, and then select all of the tracks in your playlist within iTunes and drag-and-drop them to the Windows Explorer window. These tracks will be copied from your iTunes library directly to the destination folder.

You can also check the size of each of your playlists to ensure that they will fit on the destination SD card simply by looking at the total playlist size at the bottom of your iTunes window, or you can use Smart Playlists for this purpose to automatically limit your playlist size to the size of your SD card.