Unable to locate file help

[macman4789]

Hi,

I've had iTunes Match for years and uploaded all my songs to the cloud. I only have a 256gb SSD drive so this was perfect as if I wanted to listen to a song it would just stream it from the iTunes servers instead of having to have my entire library downloaded on my Mac.

I recently decided to try the google music service and so needed to download my entire library. I therefore had to plug in an external drive and change the location of my iTunes library to this drive. My problem now is whenever I don't have my drive plugged in to my Mac all of my songs have the exclamation mark next to them and bring up the message 'Unable to locate file.' My question is how do I go back to how I had it before when my Mac could just stream everything from iCloud iTunes Match servers without it asking the location of my files? I don't want to have to plug in my drive every time I want to play music without the error message.

If I change the location of my library back to my Mac won't it be looking for all the files that aren't there?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Boyd01]

Unless you take some specific steps, iTunes always keeps the library database on your internal drive, even when the media is on an external drive. And it is probably even worse, as I found out the hard way. If you start iTunes and the external drive isn't available, the database becomes corrupt and even if you plug the external drive back in you will have a variety of problems.

I don't use Apple Music so I can't really help there, but this article explains the proper way to move your library to another drive. Note the section around the middle of the article about moving the database. I

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/

f you put both the database and media on the external drive, you won't have this kind of problem, since neither will be available when the drive is unplugged. The problem occurs when the database is available but the media is not.