Moving individual song files within iTunes

[beemshake]

Hi there,

I keep my iTunes Media folder on my external drive, but I found that recently iTunes has put several of the albums I've ripped on my local drive (/Users/<me>/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music, I assume that's the default location). Not sure why, though I know there was a time when my drive was inaccessible for some reason, so perhaps I ripped them then. Anyway, point is I want to move them to the external drive where the rest of my music lives. I tried just "moving" them in Finder, and I say "moving" because Finder doesn't really let me move but rather copies to the external drive. Which I think is part of the problem, since I then moved the local versions to the trash bin, from which they still played on iTunes. I guess iTunes (or MacOS in general) tracks where files move. Once I emptied the trash, though, iTunes claims it can't find them. Even though shiny new copies are right there in my iTunes media folder on the external drive.

So, what's the right way to do this? Thanks in advance.

 

[ThornNL]

When you start iTunes, if it cannot locate your iTunes library (on your external drive for example), it uses a default library under your local user directory. iTunes will use that library for all actions until you change the location in iTunes preferences (iTunes > Preferences > Advanced and [Change...] the Media folder location to your external drive. Click [OK] and iTunes will ask you something on the order of "Do you want to consolidate all songs to the new library?" When that task completes, you should be good to go.

In the future, all operations on music in iTunes should be performed in iTunes. Anything done in the Finder (or elsewhere) is unknown to iTunes.

HTH.

 

[R.R.Mac]

I agree with ThornNL but couldn't you just put all your music locally and thus avoiding this problem altogether?

 

[beemshake]

Well, that wasn't quite the fix, but it led me to it. The external drive is now back online, so iTunes still shows my media folder as being on the external drive. If it ever had something different, it switched silently. Anyway, I tried selecting that same (external) drive again and hitting OK, but no dice, nothing happened.

However, I then found I could choose File -> Library -> Organize Library. In there is a checkbox to consolidate the library, which I did, and voila, it copied the files from my local drive to the external. Problem solved. So thanks!

Oh, and regarding why I don't store them locally: because I don't have the space.