Applications :: Storing Itunes Music Library On External HDD (not Backing Up)
Feb 14, 2009
All of my music has been stored on an external HDD in a folder: itunes/itunesmusic/. I've gone into Edit, Preferences, Advanced and told it that my I Tunes Music Location is: f:/itunes/itunesmusic But when I open Itunes, I still don't see my songs. I don't want copies of my songs stored on my computer (which is what I think will happen if I "consolidate")
I want to store my iTunes library on an external hdd and use it with a Mac and a PC. All changes made on the Mac should be recognised on the PC and all changes made on the PC should although be recognised on the Mac - one library for both. I already tried to store my library from my PC on an external HDD and then started iTunes on the Mac, pressing "alt". But I wasn't able to open the library. When I choose library.itl, the Mac just opens iTunes without opening my iTunes library. How I can put all my music, videos and podcasts on the external and then use it on Mac and PC?
I have a very large itunes library, is there a way for me to store some of my music on external hardrive and have this music still be in my itunes library when the hardrive is plugged in.
Is there a way I can use my external hard drive without the files being transferred on to my computer? as like like my iTunes music being on my hard drive without them being copied onto my computers hard drive ? because i dont have that much memory and i wanted my external hard drive to be the source for my music files and not my computer.
I have my iTunes library set to an external drive. The boxes in Pref/advanced are check. I have checked my internal drive in the old iTunes location and see new podcasts and music living there. I need to perform a organize library to move the files.
This seems to have happened in iTunes 9 and 10.
The iTunes Music library does point to an external.
I've got a time capsule setup and I'm trying to keep my iTunes library on the time capsule drive to keep my MacBook hard drive free. I keep pointing the file path in settings to the library file on the time capsule but it will randomly fall back to the default location on my hard drive with no warning. Is there anyway I can make sure it STAYS pointed to the time capsule? It's a pain to have all my songs come up with "!" and have to go and fix the path in settings again and watch it "update" everything and reorder the files and then work fine again.
The time capsule is hosting my internet network so the second I step into my house I connect to that network so I would think iTunes never has to search for it and not find it for some reason. However, I would also like to have iTunes setup to see my library on time capsule when I'm out in the wild and talking to it over the internet. I haven't set up time capsule yet to be seen over the internet but I plan to do that tonight, I'm just wondering if I'll have to change the iTunes path every couple days back to my remote drive instead of it's default path.
I have a 1TB My Studio external HD and I have it partitioned, 600GB for Time Machine and 400GB for my iTunes (I keep 100% of my iTunes library on this partition). Is there a way to backup this entire hard drive with another hard drive that I have laying around? I want some redundancy and especially since I have thousands of dollars work of iTunes stuff all in one place and nowhere else. Also, I wouldn't care or want to have it backed up like Time Machine(constantly updating) but it would be nice if once a month I could just do one back up, that way if I ever had a problem and lost a hard drive I would only be out a months worth of stuff.
I recently moved my music library to an external library by changing the pathway in Edit/Preferences/Advanced and then consolidating the library. Everything worked for a while but now when I open itunes it is not able to find all the files. Bizarrely for a lot of albums it can find one or two of the songs but the rest all get the "Unable to locate original music file" error message. The music is all there on the hard drive but I don't want to have to manually locate each one. Does anyone know what is causing this or have a script to locate the rest of the music automatically?
I have a WD external hard drive that I got for the holiday's last year.Here lately I've been using it as my iTunes library. A great way to free up some space on my Powerbook g4. Question is, why does iTunes keep changing my library folder after I'd already changed it when I initially set up the hard drive as my iTunes library destination?
Another question is how do I make sure that all my music files automatically go to the folder on the external hard drive when I download music. For example I may snag a free song from a website and will double click it after downloading and it plays in itunes. I want that file to be saved on my external hard drive as well (yes it's plugged up and plugged in).
I only have an 8g ipod so I have to constantly check and uncheck songs that I want to hear, so I want to be sure they are all in the same locale. And one way I know that certain files are on my internal and not external is when i unplug my external those files still play when they shouldn't unless it's plugged up.
I've never bought iTunes music/movies before so I never bothered to know this stuff. I only buy iPhone games, and as you know it's no problem to just re-download them after a erase-and-install or whatever. But with movies+music, you can't do this. I know they are riddled with DRM (the movies, anyway), so I'm wondering how I'd preserve them between reinstalls. I know I can burn a DVD or CD and do it that way. But to be environmentally friendly (and more hassle-free ) can I just, say, transfer the movies to a folder on my iDisk, then after the reinstall, transfer it back into iTunes? Will it retain all the information, play back fine, and everything despite the DRM?
I'm having a problem with time machine repeatedly backing up my /~/Music/iTunes directory. Everytime I plug in my drive, I get a 192Gb backup which will loop continuously. I've confirmed that it's this directory using BackupLoupe and have reset time machine, repaired the disk with no errors, completely reformatted my time machine disk, and continue to have these issues. Console shows no real issue, backupd process simply requests a 192Gb backup and proceeds with it. While I cannot be sure, this appears to have started sometime after the 10.6.4 update.
I have a lot of music on my macbook and want to download more. I just bought a 520 GB hard drive. How would you recommend storing this music so that it would be easily accessible from the external and backed up yet cleared from my computer? there has to be an easier way than what I had with my pc......(everytime I wanted to hear a song from my external or put one on a cd I had to go through all these folders - transfer the song from the external to the computer and wait)
if any of you have this problem when backing up iTunes. When it ejects a disc and tells you to insert an empty disc... my machine keeps spitting out the new disc. It will eventually take it and continue backing up. Sometimes I end up having to feed it the same disc as much as twenty times. Do any of you have this problem and has anyone found a fix?
move iTunes folders/library and all my music from the internal hard drive to an external one? I want to start using an external hard disk as my source of music for iTunes. I'm running tiger 10.4.11 still.
Information: mac pro 2.16 ghz 1gb memory Mac OS X (10.4.11)
I'm a first time user for Mac and I've never ever had a laptop with a 256GB storage. So here are some of my concerns:
Musics Do I have to sacrifice my music library? What if I transfer my musics to the external storage and download it into Itunes? Does it mean I have to connect the external storage everytime I connect my Ipod? Or I can only choose a certain amount of songs to put in?.
I just updated to iTunes 11.2.2 on my macMini following an update to OS X 10.9.3. I have my music library stored on an external 1TB firewire disk and some on a second gen iPod. The iPod music is accessable and will play but the music on the external disk, while showing up correctly in iTunes, will not play. I can't even play the music from within finder (no play icon on the music file icon in finder.) I can use the right click menu option to show a music item in iTunes in Finder and it knows right where it is so it seems itunes is fully aware of the libraries location on the external drive. Â
One additional point is that I also install Xcode 6 Beta which would not install with iTunes opened. I was wondering if the beta of Xcode 6 is at issue? If is what will be needed to backout that instalation? What changes does Xcode 6 do that affects iTunes in the first place? Maybe it isn't Xcode 6 but something else just not sure.
Info: Mac Mini Intel Dual Cor (2.26MHz), Mac OS X (10.5.7)
utilizing memory on iMac. 320gb almost used (7gb left). Think this is due to extensive iTunes music library. How can I move this to an external drive to free up memory on iMac?
I have an iMac that is rapidly filling up. I would like to move my iTunes and iPhoto library to my external harddrive (I currently use for Time Machine). Is this possible or even adviseable? If I were to do this, what would I need to do. Is it as simple as moving the folders that hold these files on to the external. Would the programs find them.
At the moment most of my music is either stored on my Macbook or on an external hard drive. Is it possible to transfer all my music and videos to an external hard drive and then sync it with Itune so that every time I plug it in I can access them?
So I recently just got my MacBook Pro in mail yesterday. The first thing I wanted to do was to transfer my itunes music/library from my PC to my new Mac so that I kept all my playlists and count numbers and etc. I watch the video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyy993m1nPo) of david kadavy showing how to do it but however he does it from one mac to another.
I have a PC and I did everything he did correctly. When I tried to import my library.xml file it said "not all files were able to be transferred because they may not exist". So can anybody help me transfer my library from my PC to my Mac? BTW both of my iTunes on my PC and Mac were up to date.
I wanted to know how do i back up my mp3's from itunes library, I currently have 12.83 GB worth of songs. Do I use a external hd or is a flash drive good enough? Just in case when the world ends in 2012 and all the computers fail ill still have my music with me
Got my iTunes Library reading from an external USB drive. Nothing has changed in months. Though just recently, for 90% of my songs - iTunes can't locate them. I checked the directory where they've always been and they're still there. External drive is alive and kicking, connected to my Macbook. This sucks because I've got a gajillion playlists. And my iPhone and iPad will no longer sync these playlists. I'd really hate to manually have to re-do all of my playlists again.
Is there a way I can make a playlist of songs that are only in the playlist and cant be found in the music library? In other words an independent playlist with songs not from the library.
iTunes is automatically putting my music videos inside of the movies library and I would prefer to have it in my music library. I've tried a few things with no luck. Does anyone know how to do this?
My problem is this: A few weeks ago, the (not over-worked at all) HD of my two and a half year old MBP crashed completely. Fortunately, I have Applecare, so the HD was replaced without any difficulty and free of charge, and returned reasonably rapidly. However, all of my data, and perhaps equally upsetting, my entire iTunes collection (not far off 6,000 songs) has also vanished into the ether of cyberspace. (Did I have anything backed up? Um, no. Second moral of the story: Back-ups are Good).
Anyway, I have the entire music collection on two iPods, a classic (80GB) and a iTouch (64GB). My problem is how to restore this collection to iTunes, as syncing either of them at present may result in the further obliteration of the music collection. So, fellow denizens of MR, advise me please: What is the best way to attempt to restore - from an iPod to iTunes - a prized music collection? Senuti has been mentioned; is it recommended, and what does it entail? It was also suggested to me that I use the Classic for this attempted restoration, rather than the Touch.