transfering itunes to external drive - please help!!

I wanted to transfer all 7,000 songs to my external hard-drive and followed instructions on a mac site that somebody kindly forwarded. Basically, I checked the box telling itunes to keep my tunes in order and to copy music to the itunes. Then in Preferences I pressed change location for the tunes and highlighted my external hard drive; then opened new folder and named it Muzak and chose it. Then, after okaying everything, I went to CONSOLIDATE itunes. But now, when I click on MUZAK, it does not have my whole itunes as I thought - it's empty. And when I open itunes on the desktop, there are exclamation marks - ! - before each song title and every time I try and play a song it says 'can't find original' or something similar. THEN, when I ok that, it can play, and shifts the song as a file to MUZAK on the external drive. I thought I'd changed the library location to my external hard-drive. Shouldn't I be able to just play the tunes and have them stored AS THEY WERE originally on itunes, on my external drive? Please help!...Thanks!

Well I have done this a couple times. What I do is drag my iTunes library to the external drive. After it is done copying then change prefs to the new location. After that go to iTunes and right click a song and select show in finder to confirm it is getting it from the proper location before deleting the original files on internal. That's the best I can remember. Just don't delete anything without confirming. Maybe even move the original library to another location on the drive first to "hide" it from iTunes.

Thanks for your response. Just a question, though -
Do you mean highlight all the tunes on the itunes on my desktop and drag them to my external hard-drive icon? How will they present themselves on my external drive - as files? Thanks!

What I would do is update ID3 tags, consolidate my library and copy it (just in case don't delet or move it) all to the external hard drive (the hole iTunes library folder, including the library.xml file and all those). Now open iTunes while holding down option (alt if you have a PC keybord) and click "Select Library"; proced to select the iTunes folder (on your external hard disk now, this should do the trick. If you need (I can't check: I have no external Hard Disk) change the iTunes folder, in iTunes preferences.

What now?

Thanks for all the help so far - I am getting there! However, I've still got a few problems. I have now got the itunes icon on my external hard-drive, and everytime I click on it, itunes opens up with the music. But I'm not sure whether I have copied them over or not. I tried deleting a couple of albums on the internal hard-drive itunes, but when I went to open it up on the external, they weren't there either. Why is this? How do I now go about deleting the from the internal hard-drive? Sorry for my utter lack of mac knowledge here!

It all sounds like you haven't really consolidated your music collection, it should have copied everything to a folder you choose, ie MUSAK on the external

I have got all my music on an external and it works smoothly

Preferences I pressed change location for the tunes and highlighted my external hard drive; then opened new folder and named it Muzak and chose it. Then, after okaying everything, I went to CONSOLIDATE itunes.

Click to expand...

^^ That is maybe where you went wrong. You set the external disk's folder as the locaton of your iTunes library in the prefs THEN consolidated your library

Basically you selected an empty folder as the music's location then the consolidation had an empty folder as a source. Point the preferences back to your original library. Test everything still plays as it used to do, then consolidate the library to the external. Consolidating will move all your tracks to MUSAK and change your preferences to point to the new folder, there is no need to change preferences before you consolidate

could you please explain further?....

Thanks. Can you please clarify one thing for me? Do you mean change location of itunes back to the original on the internal drive and then CONSOLIDATE? But what do I do after that? At what point do the tunes actually move to MUZAK?

Once you have pointed iTunes back to your internal, and checked that the music links work, Consolidate will copy all your music to the folder you choose on the external AND point your library xml file to it, so that any additional tracks or movies you add will be copied to the external.

When the consolidation is finished you can delete the music on the internal drive since everything is now pointing to the music copied to the external when you consolidated

Thanks louishen. Sorry if I appear stupid here, but do you mean to consolidate when the location for the music is MUZAK on the external drive? And can you please tell me what you mean by 'pointing' the preferences back? I might need this spelled out for me.

HELP!!!!!!!

.....please!