ITunes mapped to an external Hard Drive.

Question

I think you guys answered ths question for me when I was looking for help regarding my topic, but I just want to make sure for future reference, that there is an easier way to do this tha the way I did it.
After 4 hours of messing around and finally fixing, I found (I think) my answer on this forum. Simply mapping iTunes to the external drive which now has the content, is not enough. I think all that does is tell iTunes where to put new purchases. The library list is there, but when trying to play or sync anything, there is an alert exclamation mark. When you click on that it tells you that the song can't be found and asks would you like to find it. I knew something was wrong when none of the cover art was available. So I did a test and "found" 2 missing songs, and 2 TV shows. The exclamation mark then disappeared next to each, the songs played, and I tried to sync to Apple TV just the aforementioned content, and that worked perfectly.
So now I'm faced (since I didn't know how to do this, and frankly still don't have the easy answer) with "finding" every single piece of content manually. Yikes!. So I found on this forum the "add to library" command and everything shows up fine and plays fine except that I now have duplicates of everything. One each of the exclamation point and one of the real content. LOTS! 1000 plus songs, 3 dozen movies 100 plus TV shows, audio books, podcasts.
Here is where I don't know the easy solution, which you guys know for my future reference, once you've "added to library". What I ended up doing was deleting all the exclamtion points one by one. That part alone took and hour and a half of near midnight, very tired, bleary eyes. The good thing was if you happen to accidentally try to delete the real content as you go down the list you get a warning. I checked the trash when I was done, so nothing was accidentally deleted.
The sync took quite a long time, about 9 hours, because there is alot of video content, but it's all on the TV now. Everything! Phew!
Is there an easier way to do this when you put your library on an external drive?
Many thanks for your help.
CD3

Answer 1

*Is there an easier way to do this when you put your library on an external drive?*
Sure.
Don't move the files yourself.
Point iTunes prefs where you want all you r music to be located.
Then go to menu Advanced -> Consolidate library.
This will make a copy of everything in your iTunes library at the location you have specified in your prefs.
All the info for your songs is maintained - ratings, date added, last played, etc.
Then you can delete the original files.
See this -> iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Music folder