I'm having a problem where I have all of my music on an external Lacie D2 drive. The drive is quiet but makes a fairly audible high pitch noise when the drive is spinning. So I like to turn the drive off when I go to bed. Problem being... when I do this iTunes reverts it's Library location back to the default place ~/Library/iTunes/ etc. So when I wake up in the morning and turn my drive back on everything in iTunes plays fine. But I'm constantly forgetting to switch locations back to my D2 drive. So any time I add new music to my Library the file gets copied to my internal hard drive and not to the external one. Is there any way to stop iTunes from revertting back to default location without just quitting it before I shut my drive off and then not running iTunes before I turn my drive back on? I hope I made my problem clear enough to understand.
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- Thread starter elliotay
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But I'm just adding a me too reply so that the question is seen again because I now have the same problem. And to top it off, almost every single one of my songs has ! in front of it until I double click and it and play it. This in turn is keeping my iPod from being able to update itself.
any solutions like the elliotay asks? Is there anyway to get all of those !'s away from the songs without starting every single one (5k+)?
help...
sps
But I'm just adding a me too reply so that the question is seen again because I now have the same problem. And to top it off, almost every single one of my songs has ! in front of it until I double click and it and play it. This in turn is keeping my iPod from being able to update itself.
any solutions like the elliotay asks? Is there anyway to get all of those !'s away from the songs without starting every single one (5k+)?
help...
sps
Someone should make a sticky for this... Right after I bought my Lacie 120 external and moved all my music to it I knew howto make iTunes work, its really simple but some like to say it doesnt work, Heres what you do.
Quit iTunes before doing this...
1. Make sure all your whole Music folder is on the external drive (With the itunes subfolder that contains the database information)
2. Delete the Music folder in your home(user) folder (~/Music)
3. Create an alias or link of the Music folder on your external drive and place it in your home(user) directory
4. Launch iTunes, now if your iTunes is set to have the library in its default location (~/Music) the alias will forward it to your external drive, works great.
Even if your external drive is turned off iTunes will still launch and let you play music that is on your internal drive (or drive that you are using), and cannot mess up the Library/Database because it is safely on the external hd. When you do power up your external drive you will have to quit and relaunch iTunes though.
Hope this helps
Quit iTunes before doing this...
1. Make sure all your whole Music folder is on the external drive (With the itunes subfolder that contains the database information)
2. Delete the Music folder in your home(user) folder (~/Music)
3. Create an alias or link of the Music folder on your external drive and place it in your home(user) directory
4. Launch iTunes, now if your iTunes is set to have the library in its default location (~/Music) the alias will forward it to your external drive, works great.
Even if your external drive is turned off iTunes will still launch and let you play music that is on your internal drive (or drive that you are using), and cannot mess up the Library/Database because it is safely on the external hd. When you do power up your external drive you will have to quit and relaunch iTunes though.
Hope this helps
what about...
Ok, so I did this, but apparently now I must have the external drive connected to even open iTunes. What I would like is to be able to listen to the radio stations available without having my large iTunes collection (close to 40GB) on my laptop hard drive (because it was killing my poor little 60GB hard drive).
When I tried to open iTunes without the drive connected it gave me the warning "The folder 'iTunes' cannot be found or created, and is required. The default location for this folder is inside the 'Music' folder."
If I have the "Music" folder on my internal drive, however, and the external is not connected, the computer will go ahead and create a new "iTunes" folder and change my iTunes location in my preferences back to that folder.
Is there anyway I can trip the auto change to default so that I can listen to the radio without the external drive connected OR have my Music folder there without iTunes constantly recreating a new default location inside it when the external isn't there?
thanks
sps
point665 said:
Ok, so I did this, but apparently now I must have the external drive connected to even open iTunes. What I would like is to be able to listen to the radio stations available without having my large iTunes collection (close to 40GB) on my laptop hard drive (because it was killing my poor little 60GB hard drive).
When I tried to open iTunes without the drive connected it gave me the warning "The folder 'iTunes' cannot be found or created, and is required. The default location for this folder is inside the 'Music' folder."
If I have the "Music" folder on my internal drive, however, and the external is not connected, the computer will go ahead and create a new "iTunes" folder and change my iTunes location in my preferences back to that folder.
Is there anyway I can trip the auto change to default so that I can listen to the radio without the external drive connected OR have my Music folder there without iTunes constantly recreating a new default location inside it when the external isn't there?
thanks
sps
Try making a copy of your iTunes folder (in the Music folder) then placing it in your Documents folder, now turn off the external drive, launch iTunes, it should launch with all your playlists showing, but the music in the Music folder will not be found so you can remove all that... No when you quit iTunes, power up your drive and launch iTunes it should go to the iTunes library thats on your drive.
kimmie2shoes, since this thread came out iTunes has changed considerably. You can now choose your library at startup by holding OPTION as you open iTunes. If your library is on an external drive and you open iTunes, it will still resort to your boot drive's Music folder location by default. I guess you have to either open iTunes whilst holding OPTION each time, or make sure your drive is always connected and mounted. 