external HDD difficulties

[PSUstoekl]

I just bought a Western Digital 250GB External Hard Drive for my MacBook, and it's been working relatively well in the few hours I've been using it. I bought it mainly to hold all of my media (music, movies and photos), as well as a backup volume.

In the vein of music, I moved my whole itunes library to the external piece, thinking that itunes would simply read it. This is not the case, as itunes will only go through the "music" folder on my regular hard drive, nullifying the external job altogether.

I'd like to play my music from my external hard drive ONLY, not importing it to my user space. How is this possible?

 

[eva01]

Delete the music folder in your home directory, however keep an alias to your music folder in the external HDD in the home directory

 

[PSUstoekl]

great. one more question:

how can I import songs, then, from the external hard drive without getting tons of duplicates?

 

[eva01]

great. one more question:

how can I import songs, then, from the external hard drive without getting tons of duplicates?

Hmm that one I am unsure of, as i have not imported songs since I used my external for my music. Not even sure if it duplicates them or not right away

 

[Rapmastac1]

Well, you go into the settins for iTunes, and make sure, MAKE SURE it says No on the Make Duplicate Files. then you would just simply erase ur whole library info off of ur itunes library, and add a folder (The folder with all ur music from the external) and it will take a bit to read, and bam, ur set.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a setting in system preferences that allows you to do that? I'm on windows rite now, so I can't check, tell ya wut, I will check it when I get off work. But just do as I said and you should be good.

 

[imnotatfault]

I keep all of my albums on my external.

In Prefs --> Advanced

uncheck: Keep iTunes Music folder organized
uncheck: Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library

iTunes will import the information to your library, but the files will stay on your external and will not copy over to the main HD.

enjoy!