Why do I always have to point iTunes at my external drive?

[MacDann]

I know there's a solution for this out there, but after sifting through literally hundreds of posts I'm just not finding anything exactly like my situation...

I have my iTunes library on an external drive that is connected to my Airport Extreme (Airdisk?) I migrated my collection to the external drive successfully some months ago. Here's the rub:

Every time I start up iTunes, I get the "I can't find an iTunes library so point me at one" message. I dutifully click on the button to point it at the library, and once done, all is well again.

This problem is fairly recent, and along with it I noticed that my drive is no longer mounting at startup (I'm running OS X 10.5.3) which I suspect is the problem.

Interestingly, Time Machine, which uses the same drive, has no problem. It "sees" the drive and does it's regular backup thing as scheduled. However, I don't see the drive mounted in the Finder when I open a finder window, or if I do, I don't see the drive itself, I see my Airport listed under the "Shared" heading.

I see this as a drive issue, as in something is not allowing OS X to mount the drive at startup. I'm wondering if it's a bug in 10.5 or I'm now required to go in and tell it to mount this drive on startup?

MacDann

 

[AstroHouse]

You might find the answer here:

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

 

[MacDann]

You might find the answer here:

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

Already read that, along with goodness knows how many posts in their forums. I couldn't find anything exactly like my situation, unfortunately.

Thanks anyway...

MacDann

 

[alphaod]

I don't think that works... I know you can use an external, but I don't see how it works on an Airdisk; it's like trying to access the library on another computer; not going to happen without sharing.

 

[rainman::|:|]

You could try putting a unix symlink in place of the normal iTunes Music folder (in your home folder) that points to the external... I used to have my library on a removable, and that helped me when iTunes would forget the location. But I wasn't using airdisk, so maybe not.

Symlinks are like aliases, but on the unix level - google it, you'll be able to figure it out. I don't remember the syntax of the command...

 

[iJED DV]

I've heard that if you go to System Preferences and click on Accounts, you can add the Airdisk to your login items. This will cause the hard drive attached to your base station to mount every time you log in.