Before everyone thinks I'm an idiot I just want to say I have searched a lot of Mac forums and cannot find an answer to my question. Also it's not the usuall external HD question of how do I back up my iTunes folder to use on an external HD. Now a little background to help you understand my problem. I used to have a MacBook pro with about 100gb of music on it. Recently I had to sell it because of some unforeseen money problems. Going crazy without the internet my friend gave me an old slot loading g3 iMac to use, the only problem being the 10gb HD inside. I cannot load all my music from my external drive to the iMac so instead I want to point my iTunes library to my external drive. The only problem is it's seems iTunes is only able to do this when it copies the music from the internal drive to the external. Since I don't have any music on the internal, after I point iTunes to my external and then go to consolidate my library nothing happens. If anyone can help me it would be much appreciated, thanks in advance.
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Useing external HD with iTunes
- Thread starter Dahoffman
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What version of OS X are you running?
On 10.4 and later I've had no music on my internal HDD and have always used an external, and been able to point itunes to the library of music without having to import anything.
Am I missing something that you are doing? Do you have everything backed up, or just the music files themselves? If you only have the music files themselves, then you will have to "Add" them to the library, but you can tell itunes not to copy them to the internal drive first. Then it will add them, and point to where they are located creating a libray file for you. You can them move that to the exteral drive as well, and point itunes to it.
On 10.4 and later I've had no music on my internal HDD and have always used an external, and been able to point itunes to the library of music without having to import anything.
Am I missing something that you are doing? Do you have everything backed up, or just the music files themselves? If you only have the music files themselves, then you will have to "Add" them to the library, but you can tell itunes not to copy them to the internal drive first. Then it will add them, and point to where they are located creating a libray file for you. You can them move that to the exteral drive as well, and point itunes to it.