I want to keep my Itunes on external hard drive

[tractorboy]

Hi Guys, I need an idiots guide to doing this,

I Have a very large music collection on a external hard drive, what I need to do is have a ghost copy of it in my itunes library so as not to use up all the hard drive on my computer, I know I will have to have the external hard drive connected every time I use it.

The issue I have is I haven't got a clue what I'm doing, I am using windows xp and currently have nothing in my itunes library, I dont want to end up with loads of duplicates.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[shabbado]

I have all of my music on an external and use iTunes. All I did was export the the files into iTunes by either dragging them into the Music section or going to File->Add Folder to Library. This will not copy the files into the iTunes folder on your main hard drive; the files will be referenced from their existing location on the external.

 

[nutmac]

iLounge has the most comprehensive guide that I've seen. Transferring your iTunes Library

 

[twisted-pixel]

I have my music on an external drive. I did try to transfer but it all went wrong and I ended up having to set up a new itunes library and re-import everything.

works fine now though.

 

[kjetilbj]

External harddrive

Just to be clear; theres no problems having an external HD with all music? That is, im waiting for my new macbook, i plan to have all music and photos on external harddrives. It will sertanly not be plugged in all the time. When i need to, i plug itin, and hope the macbook will 'find' all music in itunes, and photos in picasa. This will sork smoothly?

 

[unobtainium]

Just to be clear; theres no problems having an external HD with all music? That is, im waiting for my new macbook, i plan to have all music and photos on external harddrives. It will sertanly not be plugged in all the time. When i need to, i plug itin, and hope the macbook will 'find' all music in itunes, and photos in picasa. This will sork smoothly?

It won't work perfectly smoothly, unfortunately. The problem is that if you ever accidentally open iTunes when your external HD is not connected (or forget to close iTunes before disconnecting your external HD), iTunes will stupidly create a new media folder on your MacBook and the next time you go to play a song, it will look in that local folder even though your music is all on the external. So you then have to go to Preferences>Advanced, reset the location of your media back to the external drive, wait for it to reorganize files, wait for it to then consolidate files, and then you're good to go. But this process is annoying and takes up to 5 minutes. It will happen frequently, believe me.

I was hoping Apple would fix this idiotic behavior with iTunes 11, but nope.