Help using aliases

I just got an external hard drive. What I want to do is to take all my video files (tv shows, movies) in my iTunes library and put them on my external hard drive while still having my music on my macbook pro and then have all of that in one library. I read that this wasn't really possible unless I used aliases.

I copied the TV Shows folder in my iTunes folder to my external hard drive. Then made an alias of the TV Shows folder on my external hard drive and then copied that to my iTunes folder to replace the existing TV Show folder. I then deleted the TV Shows folder in the iTunes folder containing all my movies. I fired up iTunes expecting that it'd pick up the alias and start pulling the movies from my external hard drive. Instead, it pulled the movies and played the movies from the trash bin.

I emptied the trash bin because all of my movies are on my external hard drive, but now in my iTunes tv show list it can't locate any of the files. What do I do now? How do I get this working properly? Many thanks.

 

I forgot to mention that I did drop the "alias" off the end.

 

I'll try that. Right now I just copied over the TV Shows from my external hard drive, but did it without copying it to my iTunes library. So it pulls the movies from my external. Seems to be working good, but got a question.

When using my current solution, what happens when I download new TV Shows from the iTunes store? Will those TV Shows be placed in my iTunes library and then will I have to copy them over to my external?

But what if I used aliases instead? Would newly bought TV Shows be redirected by the alias to be stored on the external hard drive or would they be made in a new folder in the iTunes library?

Thanks for the help.

 

ugh. I just tried what you said step for step and it didn't work. This is what I did.

I recopied my Lost episodes back into my iTunes on my internal drive. I closed iTunes. I then found the "Lost" folder in my iTunes library and copied it to my external hard drive. I then made an alias of that folder on the external hard drive and then moved the alias to rename it. Then I deleted the original "Lost" folder in the iTunes library and emptied my trash (so iTunes wouldn't read the movie files from the "Lost" folder in my trash bin). Next I moved the "Lost" alias to where the original "Lost" folder was in my iTunes library. After all that I finally launched iTunes, went to my TV Shows and clicked on a Lost episode and it said the file couldn't be found.

And my external drive is formatted as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It is not NTFS.

Any ideas? Did I by chance miss a step? Thanks for your help.

 

Okay, before I try this massive undertaking again, do I need to make my file structure on external hard drive:

~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV Shows/

When I tried, I would simply place the TV Shows folder anywhere on the drive, like:

~/TV Shows/

Could this have been my problem?

 

That's what I've been doing, but I'm wondering how that will transpire when I buy new TV Shows from my library. If there is a way those could be downloaded to the external that would be great. I thought the aliases might be able to make that work.