How exactly do you guys set up your iTunes in external hard drives?

[Zen Desk Pro]

My iTunes library is big. It's approaching huge, in fact.

Because of this, I really want to keep all of my media files on an external hard drive and basically have an entire iTunes programs and library on the external hard drive.

I'm having trouble doing this, though. After importing all of my mp3 files into iTunes, it added all of the files into the iTunes Media Folder which basically copied every file wasting space on my hard drive.

So I deleted all of them, however, now when I want to play a song on my iTunes, I have to "locate" the song by going into my external HD and selecting the song. If I'm lucky, maybe several other songs will also be located, but not all.



Is there any possible way I can just have an actual iTunes app and library on my external HD. Then whenever I want to listen to music, I simply go into my external HD, open iTunes there, then click the songs (which, hopefully, won't need to be "located" because they're on the same drive as the iTunes app I open. While at the same time, keeping my Mac HD virtually free of mp3 files?

If so, can someone help me figure out how to do that? Thanks.

 

[CoastalOR]

I think you should keep the iTunes app on your internal drive. You can change the location of the iTunes Media folder by launching iTunes, selecting Preferences, Advanced tab, and Change the iTunes Media location folder to your external HD.

 

[Zen Desk Pro]

I think you should keep the iTunes app on your internal drive. You can change the location of the iTunes Media folder by launching iTunes, selecting Preferences, Advanced tab, and Change the iTunes Media location folder to your external HD.

That's a good idea since the media files take up a majority of the space. Should I set the location for media files before I actually import my mp3 files, though?

For example: Open brand new, empty iTunes library > Change media file location to folder in external hard drive > then import actual .mp3 files?

Will this prevent double copying? And more importantly, will this stop iTunes from asking me to locate files everytime I want to play a song that hasn't been played a while?

 

[CoastalOR]

Set the location of the media files to the external before importing.

 

[macfacts]

From the top menu click iTunes -> Preferences -> Advanced. Uncheck "copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library". Clear your library, then re import/add your songs from your external HDD.

These steps will probably clear your play count, ratings etc too. If you want to keep them you have to do more research on how to do it.

 

[Bruno09]

This might help : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201625