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Cloud9

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 10, 2005
336
17
between flesh and thought
Hello,

So I just got an external hard drive because the drive on my lappy is almost full, 3 gigs left. I want to move most of my itunes library off of my laptop on to the external drive. BUT, when I plug the external drive in I want those songs to show up in my library in Itunes. Is this possible? Is there another solution?

Peace
 
On a related note, I was actually thinking of putting ALL my songs on my recently bought external hard drive, and have iTunes access them from there. Is that a stupid thing to do? Just wanted to know what drawbacks there might be...
 
Cloud9: As far as I know iTunes can only reference one library, which means that you can have the songs on different hard drives but the songs will always be visible in iTunes no matter if the hard drive is attached or not. I would make two playlists onw with all the songs on your internal drive and one with the songs on your external drive.

Rojo: the dissadvantage is that if the external hardrive isn't hocked up to the computer then you can't listen to any music. Remember to leave at least 10% of your boot drive empty.
 
Mydriasis said:
Rojo: the dissadvantage is that if the external hardrive isn't hocked up to the computer then you can't listen to any music. Remember not to leave at least 10% of your boot drive empty.

Well I was planning to have my external hardrive always hooked up anyway. That cool?
Sorry... not sure what you mean about not leaving 10% of my boot drive empty...? Could you elaborate?
 
sorry.. i meant to say: it is best to leave at least 10% of your boot drive (the hard drive with the operating system on it) empty. i.e. if you have a 80Gb harddisk you want to leave 8Gb of room that the os can use for temporary files. It makes a big difference in performance!
 
with the new iTunes release, if you option-click the iTunes icon it will ask you to choose a library. This means you could have multiple libraries. The one on your hard drive with most music and a smaller on on your internal disk. Technically you could have all songs in one place or the other.
 
Idioteque said:
with the new iTunes release, if you option-click the iTunes icon it will ask you to choose a library. This means you could have multiple libraries. The one on your hard drive with most music and a smaller on on your internal disk. Technically you could have all songs in one place or the other.

This is correct. Not sure if its just option or option + apple
 
could you have multiple log-ins with access set to different libraries?
say 'Mobile' would access local hard drive while a 'Desktop' log-in would access the external hard drive.
 
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