I am so confused how this is supposed to work! I've searched all over the forums, Apple discussion board, and support section, and the only thing I can find tells you how to press the Option key when loading iTunes. DUH! That's the easy part! But how in the heck do you set up the libraries? Why is this not documented anywhere? I found two people asking the same thing, but no one answered them. 
Hopefully I'll have better luck with you folks.
So basically I have a MBP, and ALL of my iTunes stuff is on an external USB hard drive. What I would like to do is have that external hard drive REMAIN as my main library, the one I sync my iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, etc... but would like to COPY my music files only (about 35GB) to my MBP on the internal drive, so I can have all MUSIC files with me. I would not sync with this library, just play it on my laptop on occasion. Isn't this do-able?
Where I am having trouble is this: I held down Option, loaded a brand new library, and figured I need to go in the Prefs and tell it where to get the music files, so I noticed it showed the external drive there. I changed it to my local folder, hoping that's where I would copy the music files to, but then noticed when I loaded iTunes and the MAIN library, it automatically changed my iTunes location to the new local drive I just set for the other library. This makes no sense to me as if iTunes forces you to have only ONE choice for the source of the files, what's the point of multiple libraries? I want a different location for each of the two libraries!
Clearly I don't have something set right, or I am missing a step. Can someone please help me ASAP?
Thanks in advance...
EDIT: One more thing - what's the best way to copy my music only, to my local drive after setting this up? I tried opening iTunes and selecting all of the music files and dragging it to a local folder, and it got stuck for about 30 seconds then didn't do jack. I don't get why I'm having such a hard time with this.
Hopefully I'll have better luck with you folks.So basically I have a MBP, and ALL of my iTunes stuff is on an external USB hard drive. What I would like to do is have that external hard drive REMAIN as my main library, the one I sync my iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, etc... but would like to COPY my music files only (about 35GB) to my MBP on the internal drive, so I can have all MUSIC files with me. I would not sync with this library, just play it on my laptop on occasion. Isn't this do-able?
Where I am having trouble is this: I held down Option, loaded a brand new library, and figured I need to go in the Prefs and tell it where to get the music files, so I noticed it showed the external drive there. I changed it to my local folder, hoping that's where I would copy the music files to, but then noticed when I loaded iTunes and the MAIN library, it automatically changed my iTunes location to the new local drive I just set for the other library. This makes no sense to me as if iTunes forces you to have only ONE choice for the source of the files, what's the point of multiple libraries? I want a different location for each of the two libraries!
Clearly I don't have something set right, or I am missing a step. Can someone please help me ASAP?
Thanks in advance...
EDIT: One more thing - what's the best way to copy my music only, to my local drive after setting this up? I tried opening iTunes and selecting all of the music files and dragging it to a local folder, and it got stuck for about 30 seconds then didn't do jack. I don't get why I'm having such a hard time with this.
