iTunes Masters, help please

[justinpignatore]

Okay so yesterday I had my itunes library on my lacie hard drive and and all music i've added since I got my laptop a year ago was still on my laptops hard drive. Needless to say every time i clicked a song (assuming it was connected to the hard drive) it would just play. Today I moved all of my music to the external to make room for leopard and to clean things up a bit. I dragged the folder into the hard drive and then once it was there dragged that folder into the iTunes folder that was already on my hard drive. No every time I play one of the songs I moved today, i have to manually locate the file. This happens for more than 3000 files. Is there any way to get Itunes to scan the external and just pick up all the songs so i don't have to do this every single time?

thanks for the help.

 

[~J~]

-Open itunes preferences
-goto advanced tab
-UNCHECK "copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library". This will make itunes index the file location and metadata (movie, tv show, music, rating, etc)
-drag whole music folder to itunes from the external drive
-wait long time for all 3000 songs to be indexed (prob ~15 min or so... ok, i really have no idea on this..., but could be that long, maybe longer, i dunno)


after that, you should be able to just click on a song and have it play the file (from the external). i do this with all of my movies & tv shows on my airdisk, works great. any other questions, feel free to ask!

 

[justinpignatore]

thanks a lot, but I've got myself into a new situation.

So I did what you said and it ended up giving about 2-4 of every song/TV show in my iTunes. So I decided to spend a long time going through my external hard drive folders and making sure there was only one copy of everything I wanted. This left with 2 folders in my external hard drive: Itunes (about 75% of my music) and Itunes New. Next I deleted my entire iTunes and dragged those 2 folders into iTunes. Everything from iTunes New transferred perfectly, but the Itunes folder was empty on my hard drive. So right now I have 5,000 songs in my trash that i NEED to get back on my iTunes. It won't let me drag them into iTunes or my external and my hard drive doesn't have enough space left to hold all of the files.

What should I do? thanks!