ITunes :: Play Media Files From Connected Hard Drive Without Transferring To Mac's Hard Drive?
Jun 3, 2012
How do i play media files from my external hard drive without transferring the files to my mac hard drive? I have a lot of media files and want to be able to play them soley from my external hard drive.
I recently bought a Macbook and I have a external USB hard drive that is formatted NTFS. I copied all of the files off of external HD and pasted them on my Macbook. I slicked the external hard drive and formatted it as FAT32 so I could read & write on both a PC and Mac if I need.
Anyways, once the external hard drive was formatted I tried moving all of the files back to the external but I keep getting and error code once I paste the files on the external drive. It says: "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. Error code 0"
Now I'm not sure if the files are locked or what but I need help. I want to move them back to the external drive. It actually copies a few files to the external but nowhere near what all I need. They are just some .doc files that are on there
I have recently made the plunge into mac kingdom and very pleased so far.
I am going through the pain staking task of transferring music, photos etc.. from my windows laptop to my new macbook pro.
I started off by setting up file sharing and copying files but it is taking absolutely ages.
Ideally I would like to use my 500gb mybook external hard drive but given an experience I just had when putting a memory stick in my mac straight after loading it up from my pc am I likely to lose all my current external hard drive data?
Complete ball ache if thats the case as all my films are on there and burning it all to DVD would take forever.
Had a hard drive failing/failure. I am having my bad hard drive replaced with a bigger hard drive. (New Obviously) I have an iMac. (1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 17-inch) To have my data transferred from the old drive will cost over a hundred bucks more. I am trying to save money but transferring it myself. All im looking to transfer is my photos. I did not have an external drive but i WILL purchse one now. My question, (to save some money) is how would i transfer my old pictures from my old drive, too my new installed hard drive. Can i use USB? Firewire?
I'm replacing my old 120gig hard drive with a new 320gig hard driveWhen Ive got the new hard drive installed can I just put the old hard drive in a enclosure kit/caddy and copy my music/movies/etc across to the new hard drive?Or do I have to copy the data off before I remove the old hard drive?
Got a slight problem transferring files from my Macbook Pro to my portable hard drive. My portable hard drive is partitioned into NTFS and FAT 32. The files are over 4gb big so ultimately I cant copy it to the FAT 32 partion and NTFS doesnt seem to work with mac books
I am trying to transfer a large file (~7GB) from my macbook pro to my external drive... but seems that I keep getting an error. If I try to drag and drop from my Mac drive to the folder of my external hard drive I keep getting this message: 'The operation can?t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code 0).' I tried to use a UNIX command with the Terminal $mv file.xxx /Volumes/HardDrive/ at first it seemed to work, but after a while I receive this message from the Terminal: 'File too large' I am now frustrated... I need to save this large file for backup purposes and my external hard drive is not big enough to be used for Time Machine (it has 80GB out of 160 of space left)
I figured it was the motherboard and that is way too costly to replace. So I just bought a Macbook and I'm waiting for it to arrive. I'm pretty sure that the hard drive on my pavillion is still ok, so what I've purchased a hard drive enclosure and plan to use that as an external hard drive as well as transfer my files to my new macbook. My question is whether I would be able to transfer my files from my PC hard drive to the macbook directly without formatting the hard drive because that will erase all my files.
I just bought a 2TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro drive. And I'm passing data (mostly video) onto it from a WD MyBook drive. Both use the Journaled HSF format. I'm on a MacBook Pro (10.5.8).
Problem? Every so often I get a message saying "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data......could not be read or written." And once this happens, the transfer falls into some limbo land � it won't copy any more but i can't get rid of the "copy" window showing the halted progress. I actually have to reboot just to begin the transferring process with another folder.
So what goes? In the last case, it was some JPG file that appeared to stop the action, usually it's some kind of video file. But I can't find any rhyme or reason to why this occurs, nor can I find any distinguishing characteristic of the offending files.
After weeks of issues since migrating my entire iTunes library to a NAS (WD MyCloud) from a PC I think I'm going to move it to the harddrive of my new iMac.
My questions are:
1) iTunes keeps showing that there are around 150 songs it can't locate (displays the exclamation mark next to the songs) which I then have to find manually - do I need to find all songs first before moving the library?
2) The total size will eventually be around 550GB once all further CD's are ripped - will this considerably slow down my iMac which is 1TB? (so far I have only used 79GB of it)
3) One of the reasons I want to move the library is that the NAS somehow more than duplicated most of the files so now my itunes shows I have 264GB of music but the NAS is showing 540GB - iff I migrate the iTunes library, I'm assuming it will only move the 264GB that it links to and not all the duplicates - is this correct?
I have a 3TB USB 2.0 "media" external hard drive attached to my iMac. I use it to store all itunes media only, since I have over 300 movies. I also have tv shows, music etc. I just got a new 2TB thunderbolt LaCie Big Disk external drive. I want to transfer all stuff in "media" USB hard drive to new thunderbolt drive. Reason for doing this, sometimes current USB "media" drive lags on responding when I come back to use itunes from sleep or inactivity. I'm thinking about just dragging all content from old drive to new drive, eject old drive, name new thunderbolt drive "media", and relaunch itunes. Would that work successfully? I'd like my itunes to remember my play count. If my content play count is lost, does iMatch remembers play count and once I update my iMatch with new thunderbolt drive installed, will my play count be updated to my itunes?
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 27", 3.4 GHz, 12GB RAM.
I had all of my iTunes music files stored on an external HD, which I used whenever I used iTunes. Maybe 200GB worth of tunes.I now have a new MacBook Pro, and I would like to import all of those music files to the internal HD of this laptop.So, without fishing around in the ancient old system for the Library file... I'd like to start fresh. I have no interest in keeping any ratings or play counts of the tunes. Do I simply go to the Add To Library command under the File menu, and select the iTunes Music folder on the external HD? Will this copy over my entire collection, and build a new Library file? Will my music library appear the same as it was before, in the iTunes application window? I imagine that this operation will take a bit of time. I seem to recall doing something like this, years ago, and noticing that the copying process missed entire albums etc.
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4), 2.6GHz, 8GB RAM
I have recently started using a Time Capsule with an external hard drive attached. I have moved my music and video to the external hard drive to free up space on my MacBook Pro hard drive. I have set up iTunes to play from the external hard drive (which works fine), however, although I have changed the location of the iTune media folder in Preferences it keeps reverting to the iTunes media folder on my Mac's hard drive.
I've followed several tutorials on how to get this done, as it seems so simple but it's not working on my end. I've moved the iTunes folder from the /music/ to an external hard drive. I'm opening iTunes, going to Preferences, Advanced, and replacing the iTunes Media folder location to the correct one /Volumes/Volume E/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media
I'm checking Keep iTunes Media folder organized & Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library, clicking on the "OK" button, and nothing happens.
Funny enough, Spotify finds it in seconds and I can play my music from that player instead.
step by step directions for moving the actual media ‘files’, ie the mp3s, as well as the necessary library files, to an external drive, when ‘keep media organized’ and ‘copy files to media folder’ are NOT SELECTED?I am running OS X 10.6.8 and iTunes 10 [and prefer a solution which does not require updating software. I prefer to maintain my own customized folder and file structure for my mp3s; and have therefore deselected
1] Keep iTUnes Media folder organized and 2] Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library. All the directions in the various posts seem to require selecting these options. Is this critical for success?
From the many posts I have read, it seems there’s more to it than just drag and drop, that I need to ensure that iTunes is ‘pointed’ to somewhere? Not the mp3s themselves, but to a ‘library” [is that yet another copy of the mp3s? somewhere on my hard drive?].
Additionally, over the years I have moved about 45GB of mp3s to ‘storage’ external hard drives to create more space on my laptop. Not ideal interim solution. I am again low on space and have decided to buy new external drive for holding all of my mp3s, ie the 45 GB in ‘storage’ and the remaining 75 GB from my laptop. Ideally, I would like to also keep all my artwork, playlists and ratings and the like [which I guess are in the ‘libraries’???]
Am I correct, that I will need to also move to the new external hard drive that folder which holds the .itl and .xml files and which is named ‘iTunes’??? and then there is another step to link the ‘media’ to the ‘library’ to ‘itunes’?
I bought a new 500GB WD hard drive for my Late 2008 MacBook to upgrade from my 250GB drive. I have a hard drive enclosure, but I was wondering if when I install my 500GB hard drive, would I be able to use the enclosure to transfer files from my 250GB drive? I hope this was specific enough to get a clear response. If not, I'll try re-wording my question.
I have roughly a 35gb iTunes library saved to my external hard drive. Initially, I had the files on my internal, but copied the iTunes folder (like Apple's web site told me to do), and went into preferences and pointed the library to my external. After that, I deleted the files from my internal, and voila, everything was working perfectly.
However, I turned my computer off, and the next day plugged my external in, and opened iTunes, but there was no library, just the iTunes intro screen.
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 the latest version of iTunes. I used to store my itunes music on an 80gb firewire drive. Got a new 500gb usb drive. transferred all files manually to this new drive. in iTunes i changed my media folder to this new drive. However alot of files aren't being read or found so i must locate each manually. Is there anything I can do to make iTunes read from the new hard drive now?
This morning I went to find a band I haven't listened to in a while and it was not in the iTunes library. Did a quick search for the folder on the hard-drive and its not there either. The only thing I can think is maybe the upgrade to Lion did something I hadn't expected. But not sure. Has anyone else had this problem? I THINK I might have it stored on an external...but what a pain to find all the possibly missing music.
I have a MBP which is about a year and a half old. I have begun to run out of space on my MBP and am considering updating the hard drive to an SSD. However, I do not want to lose my data in the process and would like everything to be the same once transferred over.I understand that changing the Hard Drive will void my warranty and I am okay with that. Here are my questions and concerns:My MBP has both OS X and windows (via Boot Camp). I would like to retain the data of both partitions exactly as is on my new hard drive. So to do that, what do I have to do? I imagine that I need a special piece of software for both OS X and Windows to clone my hard drive. What software do I need? Then after cloning the drive, what would I have to do?
Hard drive on MBP died. Saved a bunch of the data by using an external hard drive with Leopard. Now using MBP with brand-new harddrive. Saved all my personal data, including the Sites folder. I did not copy the Library folder - the domain file is gone. Now I'm trying to work on my website with iWeb - I have all the data from my Sites folder - but I don't know how to get iWeb to open the website project.
I need to free up room on my hard drive. I would like to delete all my .ipa apps. Can I do that? I have itunes match, and I also sync to icloud. I know when I want to reinstall an app I just do that through the cloud. I have deleted apps to test that this is ok but the apps end up getting reinstalled. Here is what I want to do:
1. delete all my .ipa files on my computer to save a lot of hard drive space (I have a lot of apps....)
2. stop syncing to my computer, and only sync to icloud
3. rely on itunes match for backing up music
4. have calendar and contacts sync through icloud
5. if I need to reinstall apps do that through the tab on the app store for 'purchases.'
I am new to Mac OS. I have a new MBP 15'. I have bought a Western Digital 750GB hard drive and I even used it once to back up using Time Machine. Now I was thinking that Can I use the same hard drive on Windows and Mac both to store media? At present as it is formatted in Mac OS (Extended ) format, I think it is not recognised by Windows. But can we create such partitions of the portable drive that one of the partition can be used for Time Machine back ups and other one as FAT32 for media storage from both Windows and Mac?
Hi i need some help on how to get my imovie projects off my hard drive and back onto my computer. is there any way i can do that and if there is please let me know
I have a stock Macbook Pro 17in i5 laptop. I just got a new hard drive. I just did a time machine backup (to an external hard drive) of everything on my computer before i switch out the old drive to a new SSD OWC...Is this enough of a back up to where once i get the new SSD drive in i simply go to the time machine and it will put everything back the way i had it on the old hard drive correct? Or is there another step i need to take to make sure i transfer all of my data safely. I cant find my parallels product key nor my Microsoft word product key so i was wondering is this going to be an issue on the new hard drive? will the computer ask for the keys or since i backed everything up in time machine will it come back like normal.
I have a USB 2.0 hard drive that I have been using to back up movie files. It has let me transfer files from my Macbook Pro HD to it hundreds of times without any problems.
I have this .mkv file that keeps giving me an error when I try to transfer it to my external. I get "Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occurred. (Error code 0)".
I have transferred plenty of .mkv files to my external with no problems. All other files work fine when I transfer them. It will let me move my .mkv file around my Macbook Pro's internal hard drive but it won't let me transfer it to the external.