ITunes :: Storing Part Of Library On An External Drive?
Mar 15, 2012
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.
I'm running out of space on my harddrive and am wondering. Is there a way to move some of my library to an external harddrive? Like TV shows and movies that I don't need to access all the time. I don't want to delete anything. I don't want to carry around a harddrive all the time.
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?
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")
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.
My iTunes library has apparently filled my entire iMac (according to the computer I have over 97 days' worth of music). I would like to know 1) how to properly save my iTunes library to an external hard drive and 2) how to use iTunes so that it uses the library on the external drive.
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 huge catch of photos that I am currently scanning and would like to store digitaly, numbering in the thousands. Right now I'm using iphoto to store the ones I have scanned, but I have only a macbook with an 80gb hardrive, and an external drive of 320gb. Evantually i am going to run out of room. I am wondering what is the best way to transfer the photos to the external drive, so that I can delete the current photos from my internal drive to free up space, then later, when I have added more photos, transfer those to the external drive, without having to have all of them in the iphoto library photo catch? I am concerned that if they are all stored in the iphoto library folder on the external drive, then eventurlly, this folder will be too big to reload on my computer. Also, when I erased the photos already stored in the external drive from the internal, then added new ones, then tried to put those in the external drive from iphoto, the external asks me if I want to overwrite the iphoto library it has stored because the folder names are the same. I would like to be able to have several iphoto library files on the external drive, so they don't all go into one huge file. Does that make sense? If anyone has any experience with organizing a huge catch of photos, I would love to hear it, as this is relatively new to me.
I was thinking of getting an external hard drive (or a raid 1 setup) for backup. What I'm wondering is if it's possible to do this: Have Time Machine back up the entire system on to the drive (or raid), and also add files to it from a different computer that wouldn't interfere with the stuff that's already on there from Time Machine. Would this be ok, or would the drive only be able to do one or the other?
I transferred all my itunes library to an external hard drive.I had all my songs in itunes and then went to "preferences" and set itunes to look on my external hard drive for my itunes. Then I went to "library" and then "consolidate", and it moved all my library over to my external. I can verify that my songs are all there on my externalHowever, now, itunes won't play any songs of mine. I double click on the song in itunes and it just wont play. There's no error message, there's no exclamation point, it just won't play. Any idea what is goign on? Preferences still shows that my library is directing to the external
I have a Mac Mini connected to a Lacie external HD that houses all of my iTunes library. I've just bought a new iMac to replace the Mini and want to keep the iTunes library on the external, just point the new machine's iTunes to the existing library on the external.
How best to do that? I don't want to restore from TM because I want to start fresh from this Mac and there really isn't a lot to keep other than the iTunes (most of it is on the external). If I point to an existing location, I don't need to Consolidate, do I? Any risk of losing the library? Do I need to unlink the library on the existing Mac?
my itunes library is on an external hard-drive. I have another external harddrive that is portable and I'd like to have this one to travel with and be able to update it from the main library on the other ext. hd. Right now I have just copied over the entire library of music - no itunes involved - but I realized that this doesn't work for me as I want to be able to update that music file with the newer stuff found on my other main ext. hd.Â
Info: MacBook Pro (13-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.3), external harddrive
I have an older Mini with about 600 gigs of losses files on an external drive. I have a new mini and I want to use the same drive. Can I somehow point the new mac to the same location?
I have had a series of hard drive issues. My iTunes library is kept on an external drive. This is the second one that failed. I am unable to copy the files enmass from one drive to the other using the normal method for relocating an iTunes library (due to drive errors). However, I was able to do a folder-by-folder finder copy from the failed drive to the new external. Then, I went into iTunes preference and repointed the iTunes Media folder location to the new drive. I had the "keep organized" and "copy files to library" boxes checked. Then, iTunes wanted to update the files, which it did. However, all of my file paths in iTunes still point to the old, damaged hard drive. How do I get them to have the correct path to the new drive? I had this situation once in the past, but I cannot remember how I solved it.
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), 2.5 Ghz, 4GB Memory
The mini mac is full and I want to be able to use the 2 tb drive as storage and time machine. How do I get the content onto the external drive and access it it and hoe does new content get downloaded and stored to the drive not the mac? Also can I have 1 drive playing storeage and back up or do I need a second?
I need to move my iTunes library from one external disk to another, because the original disk is about to fail. So, I went into iTunes Perferences --> Advanced, and set the library to a new, empty folder on the new drive. Nothing changed. I expected all my music to vanish from iTunes, so that I would have to re-import it. However, all the music remained, still on the old disk. At this point, if I were to recreate the library on the new disk, I would have all of my music twice. Is it possible to move an iTunes library from one external drive to another, or am I stuck with my original choice until I buy a new machine? If I can move it, can one of you clever folks explain how it could be done?
So, my iTunes library is getting too large for my computer's storage capacity. I'm thinking of moving some of my library to an external, USB hard drive. However, I've never done iTunes through an external hard drive before and I have some questions. Can I copy new discs (import) straight onto the external hard drive? Or do they need to go onto my computer first then get transferred to the hard drive?Can I still use iTunes Match and pull songs from the library on my hard drive and from the main computer?To partition a library between a computer and an external hard drive, do I need to activate sharing or anything special? Or will the computer/main iTunes library just consider the external drive to be a different location for some of the tracks?How would I backup the external hard drive? Would Time Machine (running off a separate hard drive) back up another external hard drive if they were both plugged in?Can you burn the entire library to data discs anymore? Or do you need to make a playlist of your entire library? If the latter, is there a way to turn off the message about iTunes in the Cloud playlists only accepting songs matched or uploaded? I have some songs that erroneously did not get matched or uploaded. If I try to put them in a playlist and burn it to a data disc for backup, iTunes won't do it.Â
I want to copy my iTunes library from one external drive (currently connected to an iBook) to a 2nd external drive (connected to an eMac). The library is almost 60GB and so can not fit on either machine's hard drive.
The music currently plays through the iBook from the first external drive.
I want to be able to play the same music on the eMac (through the 2nd external drive).
Which is the best way to go about this?
Should I:
a) Connect the 1st external drive to the eMac and manually drag and drop the music from there to the 2nd external drive, or
b)Use Silverkeeper Basckup and do a backup of the Music folder in the 1st drive to the 2nd drive, after connecting the 1st to the eMac?
or is there not much difference in doing either? Or is there a more efficient option using iTunes?
I just bought a MacBook Pro. I have my iTunes library on an external firewire HDD. I want to keep it there, but have iTunes on my new Mac access it. However, even though I have put the path to that drive in iTunes Preferences, the songs there don't show up in iTunes.
The new Mac is authorised, and I have bought a song on the iTunes store, which was saved to the external drive.
So what do I need to do? Do I get one of the library files copied over from the old machine (also a Mac)?
I was able to do it on my pc. Is there anyway I can remove my music from my harddrive (Macbook) and place in my external hard drive. And everytime i open itunes it will grab the music from my external hard drive. Also my external hard drive is hooked up to my airport extreme.
I want to get a mac but one thing that concerns me is my itunes. I have a massive library and if I get a mac I will need to copy the library to my external hard drive from my pc then copy it again to the mac. How could I do this without losing my playlists, rating etc? And also if you have all your photos in iPhoto can you access them without opening iPhoto? If you can how? Because I have played around on Macs in the Apple Store and couldn't see where they would be!
so i followed all of the steps in this support article from apple.
now heres the twist that i need help with.
i recently bought a new imac and i had a 1TB external hard drive from before. all of my music and movies are already on the drive but i didnt have it with me when i first was using my imac so i setup a itunes library on my imac. so when i hit consolidate in itunes none of the music and movies that i had from before are showing up in my itunes.
I have two itunes libraries, a library of current podcasts and music on my internal drive (ID) (which runs the operating system)Â which is running out of space, and an external drive (ED) with old music (from CDs) that I keep in stoarge for special occassions when I am away from home and I want to play music.Â
The ID and the ED have their own itunes library. Â
I am running out of ID space, so I want to move all my pre-2012 podcasts from my ID to my ED.   I will then have the podcast when I am away from home and I want to play them for myself or others.
How do I transfer just the podcasts dated prior to 31 December 2011 from the ID to the ED?  After I transfer them, i can delete the podcasts from the ID and get more free space. Â
I moved my iTunes library to an external drive, but now my apps are gone? I do have iTunes match and iCloud, so my songs are all on the cloud, but none of my apps are showing... I copied everything over, consolidated, but I must have messed something up as I think I have too many library files on the external drive now. I can see all my files on the external drive, but they are not showing up when I open itunes. It looks like it linked to a new copy of a library as only my most recent apps are showing, nad none of my existing ones are on itunes. What should I do to fix this? How do I know which files to delete?Â