I now have several tips on how not to move an iTunes library from a Windows machine to a Mac. The presmise is simple; firstly request iTunes consolidate the library on the source machine and then move the c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Music\iTunes folder to ~/Music/iTunes on the Mac.

So, what I would reccommend not to do:

• Simply copy the iTunes directory from an NTFS partition to a FAT formatted media. Somewhere between there and OSX I found special and unicode characters in the filenames got lost. Theoretically maybe this should work, but it didn't.
• Attempt to be "unixy" and use a Windows tar utility to a FAT disk. FAT only supports files less than 4GiB.
• Re-format the external media as NTFS and then use a Windows tar utility. Untarring on OSX resulted in even more screwed up filenames.
• Moving via samba/NFS

What I would recommend is using the 7-Zip utility to create an uncompressed archive of the directory on a NTFS formatted disk (for large file sizes) and then unarchiving it on OSX at the other end. This reliably handled all the crazy file names and the migrated library works perfectly.

A fantastic site I've stumbled upon lately is the Airmen of Note Archive. You don't get traditional big bands sounding consistently better than them.

They have an extensive audio archive for download with a small fee to support the bandwidth of the site. It seems a typically governmental thing to do to create amazing recordings and leave them to languish, and thankfully this site has dug them all up.

Clicking on the links to download all those MP3's isn't a very Linux user type thing to do. In that vein I've put a directory hierarchy filled with links to the albums and the album cover in airmen-download.tar.gz. Pay on the site for a user name, write a few scripts and you should be ready to go (feel free to mail me if you have no idea what to do). The original Python scripts I used to extract it all are available there too.

If you like Jazz, spend the $20 and get this fantastic collection. Although it's not all my taste, mostly because at times it feels a bit cheesy, it's a mine worth exploring for the fairly fairly frequent nuggets of solid gold.