External music PC HD to Mac Mini - how?

Ok folks I'm brand now with this so please be patient. I have a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive that has approx 840GB worth of music that I want to put on my Mac Mini/iTunes. How does an a professional newbie do this?

I'm new to Mac and have very little iTunes experience. There's a boat load of music on here I would like to start enjoying

Thanks,

Tom

Why not just leave your music on the WD hard drive and instead point your iTunes music library to the WD?

Why not just leave your music on the WD hard drive and instead point your iTunes music library to the WD?

I warned you that I'm new......and how do I point it? CAn I just plug this WD into the Mac Mini and the iTunes will recognize it?

CAn I just plug this WD into the Mac Mini and the iTunes will recognize it?

Click to expand...

No. See below.

Apple has designed iTunes so that the music library can also be on an external hard drive instead of the internal hard drive. This is so that users with large music libraries don't have to eat up all the hard drive space on their Macs.

Read the article at the following LINK. Keep in mind that your music library that currently exists on your Mac's hard drive may be empty right now. But that's OK. After moving it to the external hard drive you can then further move the music files into the library on the external hard drive.

If you don't wish to do the above, then you'll need to add the music from your external hard drive manually into the music library on your Mac's hard drive. But with a library that large, you'll quickly fill up space on your Mac's hard drive.

Also, if you make the external drive your iTunes library, and if it is formatted NTFS, you will need something to allow OSX to write to that drive if you want to add more music there. Paragon NTFS (search for it) is the application recommended by the wizards here.