itunes for listening to music off external hard drive on MBP?

[iSteven]

So I checked the threads on here and tried multiple ways and cant figure this out.

I have a MBP, itunes 10.1.1, and a western digital passport essential.

I loaded pictures and my old itunes library off a HP pavilion desktop.
On my Mac, when I try and open my external hard drive off the desktop and click my itunes library file I stored from my old HP it simply wont open. I right click it and click open with itunes and the file icon fades off my screen very quickly like its trying to import it but wont. I have tried dragging it and holding option when opening itunes, which actually does display the playlist but only with explanation points because the files cannot be found.

I just want to be able to plug my external in and listen to my playlist I have stored on the western digital, on my mac book without erasing my current itunes playlist on my MBP.
How should I go about this? What am I missing?

 

[Darth.Titan]

If I understand correctly, the external probably is formatted for NTFS out of the box. That is probably causing you issues, as OS X has read-only support for NTFS volumes.

You'll want to backup the external's content, reformat it to HFS+, then replace the content from your backup. Also, remember before adding the internal tracks to your iTunes library, to uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Media folder" in the advanced preferences.

 

[GGJstudios]

NTFS (Windows NT File System)

• Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
• Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
• To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free)
• Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx 33USD).
• Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard, but is not advisable, due to instability.
• AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS
• Maximum file size: 16 TB
• Maximum volume size: 256TB

Also, make sure the music files are in a file format your iTunes for Mac can read.