Hi. 3 year mac convert. Getting ready to do a clean install of Lion to perhaps address some beach balls and some odd homesharing issues with appletv... Think I'm ready to do this, but question how to re-establish the iTunes library.
The media folder for iTunes is presently on an external drive. The Mac itself (and internal drive AND external media drive) are backed up by a second firewire drive. Question is, once I erase everything on the mac and reload lion from usb key, is there a way to just point iTunes to my external drive and find everything again? Clearly the media is all there, but as a pre-test, I fired up iTunes pressing option (which prompted me to choose a library), and it doesn't see a "library" at all on the external drive where the media is actually stored. I *have* googled this, and it looks like there might be a magic xml file that's presently (maybe?) on my iMac internal drive, which actually holds the a pointer to my external where the media resides? But I just don't know for certain. And would like to figure this out in detail before I blast my machine from scratch. Any help appreciated.. Thanks all
The media folder for iTunes is presently on an external drive. The Mac itself (and internal drive AND external media drive) are backed up by a second firewire drive. Question is, once I erase everything on the mac and reload lion from usb key, is there a way to just point iTunes to my external drive and find everything again? Clearly the media is all there, but as a pre-test, I fired up iTunes pressing option (which prompted me to choose a library), and it doesn't see a "library" at all on the external drive where the media is actually stored. I *have* googled this, and it looks like there might be a magic xml file that's presently (maybe?) on my iMac internal drive, which actually holds the a pointer to my external where the media resides? But I just don't know for certain. And would like to figure this out in detail before I blast my machine from scratch. Any help appreciated.. Thanks all
