12-31-2009, 09:55 AM

Okay, so I made a "logical" choice and moved all my music files from three different computers onto one external hard drive (By the way, thanks for all the help when I was having difficulty figuring that out. Kudos to all y'all smart people). The problem was that I could only play my favorites (200 songs out of thousands) if I plugged it in. So I dragged them to my MBP's iTunes and let it load. Then I got a few more songs and tried to sync my iPod Touch to my Mac and it wants to erase my library, which means all my songs would be replaced with my favorites, which I don't really want.

Is there anyway to sync the songs without losing any data on my Touch? I don't want to put the songs back on my MBP because it takes up a lot of my hard drive.

Thanks
-Mark

12-31-2009, 10:26 AM

It would seem that you need to create a proper iTunes folder on the external drive, one that iTunes recognises as being the folder that holds all of your music.
At the moment, on the face of it, it looks like it only recognises those favorite songs for some reason.
If that's correct, then you need to almost start over with iTunes.
This article explains the proceedure for keeping files organised on an external drive, and for consolidating the library.
Have a read through and you should find the solution to your problem, but you are going to need to start over with your Touch I think.

12-31-2009, 10:27 AM

Are you saying that you want all your songs on your Touch, but only about 200 in your MBP iTunes library?

I don't think you can have more songs on the Touch than you have in the iTunes Library it syncs to.

Here's an option that might work, but you'll have to figure out if it's worth the hassle. Hold down the 'option' key while starting iTunes. This will let you create a second iTunes Library. Keep one library to organize your entire collection and keep another to sync with your Touch.

You have to play around with it and decide how much of a hassle it will be to maintain two separate libraries, but it sounds like you were maintaining 3 before anyway.

Edit: Even after typing this, I'm still confused as to what you are trying to accomplish. Are you trying to save storage space? On your MBP or on your Touch?

12-31-2009, 01:22 PM

You can do what you want. When you plug the touch in, check the box to "Manually Manage" your music on the touch and it should work out well.

On a side note, keeping all of your music on the touch without having it backed up on a HDD is a bad thing. If the touch goes south, you lose all your music.

01-01-2010, 06:51 PM

Try using the "add to library" function of itunes. I don't think that it needs to be on you internal hard drive for you to keep them in your library, which should allow you to sink all of your songs to you iPod (not sure, never tried it on a mac). Hope this helps!