iTunes Media Storage

[knoxtown]

I was hoping one of you brilliant minds can answer this for me. I've found a few different solutions online, but wanted to see what you guys think.

Anyway, I've got about 400gig of media in iTunes on my hard drive. What I'd like to do is have my media stored on an external drive that's always connected to the machine. My question is, if I copy the media folder to the external hard drive, then point iTunes to that new folder, will my iTunes have to be copied over again? Will nothing change, and i just delete the copy on my machine? Anything I should be aware of? I guess I'm just hoping it'll be a painless process.

Thank you in advance everyone. Have a happy new year!

 

[Bear]

,,,
Anyway, I've got about 400gig of media in iTunes on my hard drive. What I'd like to do is have my media stored on an external drive that's always connected to the machine. My question is, if I copy the media folder to the external hard drive, then point iTunes to that new folder, will my iTunes have to be copied over again? Will nothing change, and i just delete the copy on my machine? Anything I should be aware of? I guess I'm just hoping it'll be a painless process.
...

A quick search on Apple's support site found iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder. That looks like what you want.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

It is the painless way you yourself describe. ITunes is fortunately quite easy to work with.

 

[Donoban]

I'm still looking for an external drive that will present itself as an iTunes library to iTunes.

The WD Live I have used to work, but at some point an updated iTunes broke compatibility with streaming video and WD don't seem to be in a hurry to try and fix it.

 

[MacTCE]

What you described is the easiest way to go about moving your library. I've done it myself that way multiple times with out an issue.