External hard drive and new downloads help

Question

I recently got an external hard drive for my music because my library would no longer fit in my internal hard drive. So I copied my itunes folder, including itunes media folder and my itunes library file, onto the hard drive, then set my destination for my library under the advanced settings in itunes as the place where the media folder is (I believe its F:\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Media) and thought I was good to go. All the music that I put on there on the initial copy work fine and are good to go. However, when I download new music from the Store, this new music does not appear in my library for some reason. The downloads are in my purchased playlist and they can be added to other playlists, but I cannot view them in my library. Furthermore, the files are on the external hard drive in the itunes media folder, and when I click on the files in there they play fine within itunes. I have also noticed that I cannot add files to my library that are on my external hard drive. I ripped a song off of youtube that was not in the Store, and saved it to a file within F:\My Music. When I try to add this file to my library, it is nowhere to be found. What in the world is going on here?

Answer 1

Hi B,
Prepare the external HD by connecting to the Mac, open Disk Utility, select the manufacturer’s name of the external HD, select Partition and choose GUID Partition Table, format to Apple OS Extended (Journaled); quit Disk Utility.
Open System Preferences.
Click on Time Machine.
Click on “Select Disk.”
Click just to the left of "On" to turn TM on if it's not already on.
Click on the disk or partition you want to use.
Click on “Use for backup.”
Leave external HD connected, and TM will automatically do its thing.
TM's first backup will be slightly smaller than the size of the disk space used on the HD it is backing up. Subsequent backup sizes will be greatly reduced (maybe a few percent of the original, depending on how much new data has been saved to the HD TM is backing up).