Problem locating music from iTunes

Hi,

I've moved all my music to the external hard drive to free up some space on the mac. The problem is that when I go to play a song in iTunes it can't locate the file so I have to go through one by one finding them which is a nightmare. The other method I've tried is dragging the files into iTunes but then it creates duplicates on the mac.

What to do?

Cheers

If you go to itunes,file, add to library, then select the folder Itunes will sync all of the songs properly.

That should work!

Keep all of my music on an external drive also, stored in a folder I aptly named "Music".

Open iTunes - then Preferences - go to the Advanced tab - then the General tab.

There you'll see "iTunes music folder location" - click the Change button next to it and navigate to the location on your external drive where you want your music.

Check mark both items below - Keep organized and Copy to folder.

If your music is already there, iTunes will reconnect with all your music.

One issue with this scenario - If you open iTunes while not connected to your external drive and you have any podcast subscriptions, iTunes will automatically change the location back to the default so that it has a place to put the new downloads.

Not a big problem, just go back and change it again. After a couple of times, you'll soon remember not to open itunes when not connected to the external. As for those new downloads, just open Finder and start playing them from the default location, only need to play about 1-2 seconds of each one, and iTunes will move them over to the external, then you can delete them.

Awesome! Thanks for this.

bobtomay has got it down!
I keep all my music on an external drive as well just like that. The only con to this approach is the slightly extra load time for iTunes to begin playing a song.