This may be a bit long winded but here goes. I have all my music stored on an external hard drive that is connected to my Macbook Pro, I have all of it loaded in to iTunes. I recently got iTunes Match and Apple Music which I have used to match or upload all my music. Given that to put any music I want on to my iphone I have to download it via wi-fi, I was thinking of disconnecting my hard drive of music from my Macbook and just using my cloud stored music. Where the problem lies is when I "remove download" in iTunes so that only the matched or uploaded files shows in the cloud, the local file is deleted but not to the trash so that I can recover it. Am I going about this the wrong way or am I doing something wrong? Any help would be appreciated.
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Remove local itunes music
- Thread starter markoid63
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Why do you want to delete the local files, and then recover them?
Make a backup, delete your local files, and then enjoy streaming Apple Music.
The problem is quite a complicated one. In essence, what you are wishing to do clashes with the way iTunes operates.
- iTunes needs local storage space to operate for caching and various other reasons. If you remove your external hard disk iTunes will need a new local file structure within which to operate. Having two parallel libraries might get confusing over time and I can't imagine it ending well since iTunes is temperamental at the best of times.
- If you just 'stream' your non-local music, they still get cached. iTunes caches heavily when there is enough local storage - both the media file itself and auxiliary data like album artwork. So, even if you start with an empty local drive, after you've played each song in your library once - assuming there is enough local free space - you'll have effectively just downloaded your whole library again and be back to square one.