music overload

[speedy23]

I have ALOT of music on my macbook pro. so much i don't have much hard drive space left and its really slowing down my laptop. i have all the music on an external hard drive. is it possible to play the music directly off the hard drive rather than having to import ALL the songs to my laptop? itunes just imports all the songs automatically and i don't want it to. i would rather just play the music off the hard drive and save space on my laptop

 

[Relentlos]

You can import songs into iTunes without copying to the library. I think you hold option when dragging them into the window, but I'm not sure. Another way is to just disable it's automatic copying of songs into it's library. There's a setting for that in preferences.

A third way is to just run the iTunes library off the external HDD entirely. You'll have to keep it connected for it to play music obviously, but they'll all be on the external, and your internal can save that much more space.


*Don't have just 1 copy on 1 external HDD though. People seem to think that having it on there means it's backed up, but if that's the ONLY copy, then it's no different than if it was just on the internal HDD. HDDs fail at times, so it's good to have as many different updated backups as you can.

 

[Xavier]

The music can be played directly off of your harddrive. If you hold down 'option' when clicking on iTunes, it will ask you to locate your iTunes library. Just direct to the iTunes library on the external harddrive.

I have been doing this for quite some time because my laptops space is limited. I only have 160 gb and about an 80gb iTunes library.