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Moving iTunes library

D

downingp

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 26, 2006
640
3
A few years ago, I moved my iTunes library to an external hard drive. At the present time, I have the media on the external hard drive and the library (.itl, .xml etc) on my iMac.
I am now running out of space on my current external hard drive and wanted to, again, transfer iTunes to my new hard drive. This time, however, I would like to consolidate everything into one folder on my external hard drive (I no longer want the media on the external and the library on the iMac). What would be the best way to do this without screwing things up?

Thanks.
 
downingp said:
A few years ago, I moved my iTunes library to an external hard drive. At the present time, I have the media on the external hard drive and the library (.itl, .xml etc) on my iMac.
I am now running out of space on my current external hard drive and wanted to, again, transfer iTunes to my new hard drive. This time, however, I would like to consolidate everything into one folder on my external hard drive (I no longer want the media on the external and the library on the iMac). What would be the best way to do this without screwing things up?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

It's pretty simple actually. I did this several months ago and didn't have any problems. Check out the Apple Support page.

iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder
 
I did this a few years ago. and it mixed up all the date added info.
Would getting iTunes match do it for you?
 
Weaselboy said:
I believe this process will move everything.
Click to expand...

I just used this method to move my iTunes media folder (not library files) from one external drive to another. I am 100% sure that I did the steps correctly, however iTunes managed to simply not copy ~30,000 of my 134,000 songs, which is a pretty huge chunk.

I could understand if it missed a few songs due to strange symbols in the names, but that wasn't the problem at all. iTunes copied most artists, but not all of them; it copied most albums by an artist, but would sometimes just leave certain ones out. For example, I have seven albums for Bill Callahan in the original location, but the one album that I listened to the most "Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle" wasn't copied while the other six were.

Even stranger, every song from 2013 made it, as well as 2012 and 2011, but a few are missing from 2009 and more than half of my songs from 2008 are missing (I know this because I have playlists by year).

I tried to simply manually copy the folders from the original location to the new location and then click the song, Locate the file and tell it to find the rest, but it wouldn't find anything. When I added the songs by manually dragging them from the original location into iTunes, they showed up in addition to the "missing" songs, minus artwork or ratings.

Unless there's a way to remedy this easily, I want to revert to my original location (where the media is still located) and try a different process of moving the music - I had originally considered using Carbon Copy Cloner, but thought there would be no way to clone to a new drive but retain all of the library information.

So my questions are, in order - is there a way to remedy this situation? if not, how to I revert back to my original location and still retain all of the metadata/ratings/artwork/etc? and is there another way than the method Apple endorses to copy from one drive to another?

THANK YOU for any and all help you can offer.
 
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