I need help. I bought a lovely external harddrive. I tried moving my itunes music folder to the hard drive but it seems like a problem. Is there an easy way to do this. I want to move my itunes music to the new harddrive and have iTunes recognize it, also my iPod needs to find them as well. Thanks
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
external hard drive and itunes music
- Thread starter Coca-Cola
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
as far as moving the actual music goes, you should be able to simply drag the folder from your HD to the external and it will copy over everything. having itunes find this music is as easy as changing the location of the music in your itunes preferences (under the "advanced" section). the ipod, i believe, figures out where the music is by consulting itunes, so it should take care of itself automatically.
i'm having a problem with this as well...when i try to copy the folder the is an error. it reads "error code -50" any suggestions?
I agree with you i use a external HD and draged the itunes Folder to it and everything was fine. You should Drag and Drop the Folder /user/"Your account"/music/itunes/.
IIRC I just changed my music folder in the iTunes preferences and simply "told" iTunes to keep my music organized. It then just moved it over by itself.
I've done the operation both ways (from iBook to external HD and vice-versa) and have never had any problems.
Good luck!
I have a problem using my external hard drive to store my music. I have set the itunes music folder location to the external hard drive, but every so often itunes randomly decides to change it back to the default home\music folder. A few times this has happened and I haven't noticed and then I have copied more music to the computer so I end up with my music in two different places. The only way I noticed it had happened again today was when I played a tune this morning and thought hang on, my external hard drive is switched off!! No prizes for guessing - yes itunes has changed the folder location to the internal drive again and so now I am having to wait while it moves all the files I copied the other day to the external drive.
Does anyone know why this happens? It is very annoying. The external hard drive has always been on whenever I am copying music so it has no excuse to go back to the internal drive.
Does anyone know why this happens? It is very annoying. The external hard drive has always been on whenever I am copying music so it has no excuse to go back to the internal drive.
i've had iTunes move my music folder off my external drive back to its default location, and i think it happens when you add music to iTunes when the external is off or unconnected. iTunes can't find the drive, so it creates a new folder where it thinks it should be.
try this: with your external drive mounted, open iTunes and make sure it's recognizing that drive as the location of your music folder. now turn off iTunes and unmount the external.
open iTunes and check the preferences to see where it thinks your music folder is. it should list the default location (user/you/music/itunes/). close iTunes without doing anything else.
then turn on your external HD and let it mount. re-open iTunes and check the location again; it should recognize your external.
as you can see, iTunes looks for your external drive; when it can't find it, it creates a new one. if you then go and start dropping music into that folder, it seems to 'forget' about the previous location. so just make sure to have your external connected & mounted before you open iTunes.
try this: with your external drive mounted, open iTunes and make sure it's recognizing that drive as the location of your music folder. now turn off iTunes and unmount the external.
open iTunes and check the preferences to see where it thinks your music folder is. it should list the default location (user/you/music/itunes/). close iTunes without doing anything else.
then turn on your external HD and let it mount. re-open iTunes and check the location again; it should recognize your external.
as you can see, iTunes looks for your external drive; when it can't find it, it creates a new one. if you then go and start dropping music into that folder, it seems to 'forget' about the previous location. so just make sure to have your external connected & mounted before you open iTunes.
I made ~/Music/iTunes an alias for /Volumes/TravelStar40/iTunes (or perhaps TravelStar40:iTunes).
Thus there was no need to change "music folder location".
This works very well and iTunes doesn't change it either.
I once used rsync to clone the external volume on to a new volume called TravelStar80 (formerly my internal). The alias somehow got changed to the new volume. A bit scary, but I can't complain too much since that is exactly what I wanted.
Thus there was no need to change "music folder location".
This works very well and iTunes doesn't change it either.
I once used rsync to clone the external volume on to a new volume called TravelStar80 (formerly my internal). The alias somehow got changed to the new volume. A bit scary, but I can't complain too much since that is exactly what I wanted.