External Hard Drive & iTunes - help!

[quyennnn]

I recently bought a macbook pro and am making the transition from a pc to mac. It's all gone well so far, but I'm not sure what to do with my music. I currently have about 200 gb of music on my external hard drive (connected to my pc.) The internal hard drive on my pc does not have space to accomodate the files on my external.

I do not have the "Copy files to iTunes music folder" currently enabled because my internal doesn't have space. (And I like having the original music files in a separate location as I have over 30,000 songs). I don't know how to transfer my external and music to my macbook, since I will have to reformat the drive (which would erase everything on it, therefore I somehow have to make a backup either on my mac or on my pc. but what to do about the iTunes .xml file and iTunes folder on the internal pc drive??).

Anyone have any thoughts?? Thanks!

 

[autacraft]

Its not the shifting/backup of music that you need to be considering, youve done all that by virtue of the fact its on an external drive.

You just need to open itunes on your new macbook and tell it where your 'itunes music folder is'. Once itunes is open, go to the top menu bar and click 'itunes>pref's>advanced'. Then, under 'itunes music folder location', click change and hunt out your external drive (obviously make sure its connected) and the folder where all your music is stored.

Now, every time you boot up itunes (so long as your drive is connected) your music library should automatically load up.

Just make sure that any new music you want to add, goes into the folder on your external hard drive - if you are adding CD's or downloads via itunes, you might need to point 'downloads' etc to your ext.drive directory, otherwise it will just download to your laptop. (cant quite remember off top of my head).

Hope helps!