iTunes to Ext Hardrive

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Hi, might someone be able to tell me how to transfer all my music from iTunes on a Mac desktop to an external hardrive?

Thank you in advance
 
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Open iTunes. Look at Preferences for iTunes (click on "iTunes" on top bar, then Preferences. Now click on the Advanced tab and at the top will be the location for the iTunes Media Folder. Note that location.

In Finder, go to that location and select the iTunes folder that contains the Media folder. Copy that to wherever you want it to exist. It may take a while if you have a lot of stuff in it.

Once it is copied over, go back to the iTunes Preferences page and change the location to the new place you put it. Test iTunes to see that it works. Assuming it does you can delete the old location Media folder.

NOTE: If you do this, and then iTunes starts when the external is not connected and cannot find that location, it may well recreate the original folder in the original location and change the preferences to that, just like it does when it first starts on a new drive. If that happens, you will need to go back into iTunes Preferences and put back the new location.
 

IWT


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And, Irishman, remember that once moved (and working as Jake said) on an External Hard Drive (EHD), that will be your one and only copy of iTunes.

That EHD will need to be backed up regularly to another EHD (cloning apps such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! do this job very well).

Ian
 

Slydude

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You are correct Jake, when iTunes is dtarted without the external drive conaining the music/media, it will indeed go to the default location in a user's media folder. You won't notice anything wrong until try to play a file that's on the external drive. It has been a while since I had this problem but I think iTunes puts an exclamation symbol next to the track.

I had a quick and dirty script once to check for the media drive, mount it, and launch iTunes. Haven't used it in a while. I'll try to modify it a bit when I have a moment so it's not looking for my Time Capsule and post it of you're interested. Might not get that done for a day or two though.
 

chscag

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I tried keeping one of our extensive libraries of home made recordings on an external drive but decided to dispense with it. It just turned out to be a big headache because anytime I attached one of our iOS devices to itunes in order to back them up, iTunes would complain it couldn't find its library and would then create another one.

No longer a problem with iMazing 2, but you do need to remember to attach that external drive with the library each time you start iTunes.
 
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Thank you everybody.I think I may be dispensing with my desktop with no guarantees of when I will get a laptop so that is why I am moving things on to an ext drive.Thanks again.Much appreciated
 

Slydude

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I have had my iTunes library on external drives for some time now. At first it was because it wad going to take up a lot of territory on the notebook's hard drive (primary machine was a 2008 MacBook Pro).

I don't know if your next machine is going to be a desktop or notebook, but either way it's probably a good idea to have your music/media on an external drive. Most computer manufacturers are installing flash memory / SSDs instead of traditional hard drives. These drives are great for speed and reliability but large capacity SSDs, which you need if you're keeping a large amount of media on the drive, can be expensive. New machines are also making it hard/impossible to replace/upgrade those drives easily.
 
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Thank you Slydude.I am not sure if I can thank any future posters as I am being blocked from signing back in, on and off.Both yesterday and today I got back in only after a few tries.I log in and am told I am logged in but the log in box keeps coming up.It's worse on the phone, can't get in at all??But thank you everyone for now.
 

Slydude

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Hope you find those commennts helpful. It really isn't too difficult to kep the iTunes library on an external drive. If you do that and accidentally launch iTunes without the external drive attached, the problem can be solved by simply quitting iTunes and re-launching iTunes once the external drive is attached and mounted.
 

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