Extreme - iTunes - External Drive

Some time back I moved my massive music collection and some other files to a 1TB external drive which I am also using as a Tie Capsule. I then bought an Airport Extreme and plugged the external drive in to it. Now I cannot access my music library. It does not show up when I use Finder but I know the files are still on the drive.
Any ideas on how to access these files?
If I were to daisy chain 2 external drives on the Extreme and made one the Time Capsule and one the music? Would that work?

The real question I guess is: Would my apple TV be able to read music or movie files on its own on my external hard drive plugged into my Airport Extreme without iTunes running on my computer?
Sorry, but no.
And a second question: Can iTunes on my PC manage and read files on my external drive wich is plugged in that Airport Extreme trough wifi?
In theory, yes.  But, I would not recommend this since response times will be very slow, and the library will tend to get "lost" on a regular basis, requiring that you "point" iTunes at the library location on a fairly regular basis.

Similar Messages

  • ITunes external drive- how to sync

    I have a macbook and because the hard drive is only 150GB, I've always had my iTunes music on an exernal drive. I had to blow away the OS and rebuild it because of some problems and now, I can't get my music to show up in itunes. I've changed the media file location to the external drive and I've tried t consolidate but nothing is showing up in itunes.
    What am I leaving out?

    Ah, yes - i see the Compilations folder. Thank you. How do I now clear out the iTunes library on my office hard drive so that I can clear up a significant amount of disk space on office hard drive thereby being able to add more music to the iTunes library to sync manually to iPod and move over for storage to external?

  • ITunes, external drive, local drive, and iCloud and Match- help!

    I have a 2011 Macbook Air as my primary machine. Given it's small sized hard drive, I don't want any music or media to be on the local machine (if possible. So, I've done a few things over the years:
    (1) I have, inside iTunes, the default media location set to be a folder on my external thunderbolt drive.
    (2) I have iCloud support for iTunes turned on
    (3) I have iTunes Match turned on
    My iTunes library is split 70/30 between music and movies/TV shows. My household has iPhones and iPads and I need all this content available to all the devices.
    Ok, given the above factors, things seem to work pretty well. The iTunes folder on my external hard drive is about 145 gigs (about right I would think). But as it turns out, I have a iTunes folder on my local drive as well, in the "Music" folder per the Favorites section in Finder. This iTunes folder is roughly 36 gigs, so barely 1/5th the size of the folder on the external drive.
    So, I backed up the local iTunes folder (onto the external drive), and then deleted it off my local machine. iTunes started, and it played music and movies, but a few songs (picked at random) could not be found, and iTunes would try to communicate with Apple for iTunes match, but this process would stall...and the app would eventually crash (within 10 minutes of starting...even when music was playing). It didn't completely close, but it became unresponsive. Moving the smaller iTunes folder back to its original place on the local drive seems to have fixed this issue.
    Ultimately I'd like to clean off the local drive, use the external drive for whatever "local" storage I need for iTunes, and rely on iCloud and Match to provide the content to the mobile devices.
    Can anyone assist?

    The first thing you need to do is properly move the iTunes media off the internal HDD of the MBA to the external HDD. This KB article will help you with that: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449
    To use iTunes Match exclusively for streaming music the best practice is to create a new iTunes library and enable iTM on that library. This has the advantage of leaving the original library untouched. To create a new library quit iTunes, then launch it while holding down the Option key. Choose "new library" in the dialog. Do not have iTunes scan for media; then enable iTunes Match on the new library. Once the initial scan is done you will be able to stream the music.
    You will need to have a backup scheme in place for when you add new music to the library as well.

  • Extremely slow External Drive

    I have just installed a USB 2.0 Lacie 1 TB external hard drive in the rear port of my Airport Extreme router, for the purpose of storing & sharing Photos, Music & video files on our network. All this was done on the advice from the apple guy.......when i open Iphoto it takes well over a full minute to see the photo library (that little pinwheel just keeps on spinning)...Does anyone know a solution to this extreme slowness?

    Just writing to bump your question as I have a very similar question. I want to connect a HD to my Time Capsule for the same purpose as you and want it to be fast like you. I hope you get an answer.

  • After moving iTunes, external drive sometimes becomes read-only after reboot

    I had some system corruption a few weeks ago, and had to restore my system.  As part of that prolonged effort, I decided to move my iPhoto Library and iTunes Library to external FW800 drives.
    I had terrible problems initially with these drives mounting read-only.  I found a relatively quick work-around, and that seemed to fix the problem.  But I still have them periodically mount read-only, and I can't D/L iTunes updates, etc.
    Why do they keep doing this on a reboot?  Very frustrating, as I need to reboot as part of the fix, and I'm always in the middle of something else, and can't reboot at that time.

    Oh, as part of this, not sure when the change was made, OSX used to keep the mounted volume name in /Volumes, even if the volume was ejected.  Would cause an occasional problem - but very rare.  I notice now that ML seems to create/delete these mountpoints automagically - and that's part of the problem.  They get incorrect permissions when the volume mounts, and I (user I'm logged in as), can't write to the volume without some background shenanigans.
    My process is this:
    Unmount problem volume
    Drop to terminal, and "sudo mkdir /Volumes/<mounted_volume_name>"
    Remount volume via Disk Utility (you now get a "<mounted_volume_name> 1" - with CORRECT permissions)
    Unmount the volume again
    Remove the created directory (i.e. undo step 2)
    Remount the volume - 99.9% of the time that seems to fix it.
    Reboot to be sure - and it stays for a while - then at some point becomes a problem again.
    Not sure if it's something in ML that's an issue - or something in iTunes or iPhoto (but can't see how they would affect the permissions when the system reboots and you login)

  • Does AirPort Extreme support external drives with Advanced Format (4K) ?

    Hi!
    I have an AirPort Extreme from 2008 and now i want to use a Raid 1 USB HDD for Time Machine.
    The new disks often has the new "Advanced Format" (4K blocks).
    Does this APE support such 4k drives?
    At the moment i don't have any experience with this new format,
    for this reason i don't know if the APE or the hdd case has to support this format.
    regards
    Sebastian

    Sebastian Brandner wrote:
    1) I'm using a simple USB Disk, connected to my APE, as Time Machine Backup Volume. This works quite well for about a year.
    Yes, for a few folks it does appear to work for a number of days, weeks, or months. But sooner or later, the backups turn up corrupted, often beyond repair. It happens to me about eery 3 months, which seems fairly typical. That's likely why Apple doesn't support it, and nobody should depend on it.
    2) The RAID Case shows only a single disk to the connected device, raid 1 handling ist internal and so it's again just a simple usb disk.
    Correct. I didn't say otherwise. In a supported location, Time Machine will back up to a hardware RAID set (but not a software one).
    3) The link with the supported disks doesn't handle the new disk format 4k. :-/ Maybe the support entry is too old.
    Note that it's a 2008 Airport Extreme; that predates the support article by at least a couple of years.
    But by all means, call AppleCare if you don't believe the support article.

  • ITunes Settings for Media on External Drive via Airport Extreme...

    iTunes Settings for Media on External Drive via Airport Extreme base station versus plugging directly into laptop.
    My current configuration is that my iTunes Media (700gb) are all stored in an External Drive that's plugged into my Airport Extreme Base Station. This works great for me having wireless access to my iTunes external drive.
    Whenever I need to back up that hard drive with Time Machine, I just plug it directly to my laptop...
    But how do I let iTunes (or iTunes library) know that this is the same hard drive where all my media is stored when it's plugged directly into the laptop as opposed to trying to access it from my Airport Extreme network?

    No there isnt any files call library in the folder i created I am now in the process of copying them back but I guess I will loose all my playlists and playcounts. I do have a Copy of my drive that i made with carbon copy cloner. So maybe it will be best to boot from there, restore and start again.
    Chris it was just the media folder. I was following the instructions on the apple support page. Got to point 14 didn't get the warning but did seen to have a brand new itunes, so emptied the trash as they said expecting everything to be fine but it wasnt.

  • Can I use an external drive for a 2nd time capsule backup?  Other questions too

    My setup:
    1 Macbook Air
    1 Mac mini as HTPC
    1 Mac mini as a media server (5tb and growing) with external drives.
    I want to get a 2tb time capsule to back up my laptop and mac mini that i use as a HTPC.  Simple enough....
    Since the new gen airport extremes support external drives to a time machine back up i want to plug a CineRAID device with 4 6TB drives (12gb of storage in a RAID) and use that as a backup for my media server.  Could I just plug it directly into the mac mini?  Yes, but i am trying to have the lest amount of clutter possible visible. So i want to put in a closet where my router is..
    So can I plug in the CineRAID into the usb port for a 2nd time machine backup with massive storage?
    Option 2: 
    Just get an airport extreme and use the CineRAID for a backup via USB...
    Also,  how much space does the airport extreme support?  Like i said up time I am at 5tb but its growing fast

    So can I plug in the CineRAID into the usb port for a 2nd time machine backup with massive storage?
    There is conflicting advice about whether a RAID setup will work with Time Machine, so you can find information that will say that it will work and other info that will say that it will not. In general, Apple says that Time Machine must "see" the RAID drive as a single partition, but they also say that you need to check with the support folks at the drive manufacturer for more details.
    The only way that you will know whether it will work or not on your network, is try it out on your network.
    Please let us know about your results.
    Just get an airport extreme and use the CineRAID for a backup via USB...
    Same as above.
    how much space does the airport extreme support?
    The firmware on an AirPort Extreme will support up to a 4 TB drive, but I have not tried it on a larger drive, so we'll need another user to answer on that one. Here again, it would be wise to try a few "tests" before you try to backup or transfer a large amount of data.

  • Best way to back up mac and external drive to time machine?

    My LaCie external Time Machine drive crashed on me somehow and I had to repartition it. I have a second back up (different external drive) through CCC so Im not worried about data loss, but for the life of me, I cant remember how I had time machine configured to back up. I have a second separate external drive that contains my iphoto, imovie and itunes libraries on it. I think I had time machine set up to back that drive up along with my mac separtely somehow, but after thinking about it, isnt that a little redundant. Am I not backing up my iphoto/imovie/itunes external drive through my mac back up? Seems like before I could go into time machine and open that drive from there. If so, is there any reason to back up the iphoto drive separately along with my mac back on time machine, or is that even possible? Would it be easier to restore the iphoto hard drive if it were backup up separately, not as a part of my mac backup? I have had my CCC back up (a second external back up drive) set up to back up the mac and the pic/video/itunes drive separately.

    If you open TimeMachine's preferences and click on the Options button you'll see that it works with a simple exclusion rule. It assumes it should back up everything on every drive connected to it except for those files, folders, and drives you exclude.
    Like you, I have a separate external drive for media. After playing around with TimeMachine way back when I realized that each time I edited the meta data for music the song or movie got backed up again. I also discovered that at that time TM didn't play nice with iPhoto's library. Given these issues I decided to exclude my media hard drive from TimeMachine and back it up using ChronoSync (on an automatic schedule) once a week.
    After some thought I decided I didn't want a simple clone because if a song or movie became corrupt I didn't want to overwrite a good song with a corrupt version. ChronoSync does archiving. When doing a backup if it finds a file has been changed it archives the old one and overwrites with the new one. I look at the logs each week to see if any archiving took place. If I didn't do any editing that week there shouldn't be.
    BTW - being a belt and suspenders kind of tech, I have multiple backup drives so one TM drive and one media drive is always off site. A backup is no good if the thief steals it.

  • I can not store all my Music on my internal Macbook pro hard drive so I am storing it on a large external drive connected to my airport extrem.  How do I get Itunes to search for the music here with out trying to copy it to my laptops hard drive??

    I can not store all my Music on my internal Macbook pro hard drive so I am storing it on a large external drive connected to my airport extreme (2 TB drive plugged into the USB port).  I see the drive on my laptop and I can add and delete files no problem.  How do I get Itunes to search for the music here with out trying to copy it to my laptop's hard drive?  I don't have enough space to do that.

    How did you move the music to the external drive?  What exactly is on the drive?  The entire iTunes folder or only music?  If it is the entire iTunes folder you can do the option+start suggestion earlier.  If you copied only music and did so by dragging it there then you need to delete it again and consolidate/organize it there instead so iTunes tracks the move.  iTunes 12 for Mac: Change where your iTunes files are stored - http://support.apple.com/kb/PH19507

  • Would I benefit from unplugging my 3 Tb external drive (itunes library) from my pc and plugging it to my airport extreme?

    The real question I guess is: Would my apple TV be able to read music or movie files on its own on my external hard drive plugged into my Airport Extreme without iTunes running on my computer?
    And a second question: Can iTunes on my PC manage and read files on my external drive wich is plugged in that Airport Extreme trough wifi?
    Thanks for you help!

    The real question I guess is: Would my apple TV be able to read music or movie files on its own on my external hard drive plugged into my Airport Extreme without iTunes running on my computer?
    Sorry, but no.
    And a second question: Can iTunes on my PC manage and read files on my external drive wich is plugged in that Airport Extreme trough wifi?
    In theory, yes.  But, I would not recommend this since response times will be very slow, and the library will tend to get "lost" on a regular basis, requiring that you "point" iTunes at the library location on a fairly regular basis.

  • Extremely Slow Disk Access from External Drives (USB & Firewire)

    Following the upgrade to 10.6.2 (from 10.6.1), my computer is communicating extremely slowly with all external drives (both Firewire 400 and USB). File transfers which used to take less than a minute now take 5-10 minutes (less than 1 GB). Peering into the Console, I see messages for each aspect of a file reading: Nov 13 12:30:12 Nautilus /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder[152]: Possible unresolved transaction race -105/filename
    (Nautilus is the name of the computer)
    By "each aspect", I mean that for Pages files, it provides a message for Quicklook,(null) , Contents,(null) , and filename,(null).
    All disks are in good health, formatted as FAT32 for ease of use with all OS types, and are SATA.
    Again, this occurred immediately following the installation of 10.6.2 (both Software Update and Combo). I've seen similar errors online with iTunes libraries on network drives, but this is on directly connected drives.
    I normally wouldn't ask this, but, is there a way to reinstall 10.6.1 over .2? At this point, Time Machine would likely cause me to lose other data as well in a full revert, since it has been more than a few days.

    I have various personal files backed up on these drives (not system data): music, pictures, documents, etc.
    FAT32 should not be an issue, as I have used these drives for over 2 years with Tiger, Leopard, and then Snow Leopard with nay an issue, until now. Additionally, while the Time Machine backup may be an archive, it is the sole occupier of an HFS-formatted partition which is not exhibiting the issue. I only included that information since it is physically on the same drive as a partition (FAT32) which is being troublesome to rule out driver/hardware problems.
    Bottom line: All of my drives worked perfectly on 10.6.1 (and continue to do so on my other Macs (10.5.8), but do not on 10.6.2. I was only looking for a potential solution to my computer's specific issue, not a statement that my "compromise" is the cause of my problems.
    Actually, since Apple fully supports read/write access on FAT32 partitions, I should, indeed, be able to "have all things all ways...", no offense intended.

  • Using an external drive with shared files (iPhoto, iTunes), attached to a Time Capsule, can the contents of the external drive be backed-up to the internal Time Capsule drive? Perhaps a RAID1 mirror to a partition?

    Using an external drive with shared files (iPhoto, iTunes), attached to a Time Capsule, can the contents of the external drive be backed-up to the internal Time Capsule drive? Perhaps a RAID1 mirror to a partitioned Time Capsule? I understand that the Time Machine (software) cannot backup a networked drive (the external) and that Time Capsule (the router/wireless hard drive) does not have its own backup software... so it won't backup the connected drive. What I would like is an alternate solution for having an automated backup of a networked drive. A 2TB Time Capsule has more than enough space for Time Machine backups of my family of Macbooks, so I had hoped to mirror a 500GB external drive (with shared media files) to a portion of the Time Capsule internal hard drive. I assume this would require a partition of the Time Capsule drive. If not, would the sparse file from the various computers being backed up need to be copied to the external drive as part of the RAID1 setup? This seems like overkill for the Time Machine backup, but it would cover the media files.  

    The complexity with this idea is the software has to run from a Mac computer on your network.. so you need a Mac turned on, probably most of the day.
    It isn't possible to partition the TC although you can create a image area.
    The software would have to copy the material, that means all files to be copied, go from USB drive, back to the Mac, then back to the TC, and written to the drive. In other words you have just added Network congestion, although a proper incremental backup type software will not actually use a lot of capacity.
    Finally it will be slow.. network drives are slower than internal drives. Well USB connected drive is much slower than the same drive connected directly to the computer.. and if the drive is connected directly to a computer it can be shared with the network.
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4577/airport-extreme-5th-gen-and-time-capsule-4th- gen-review-faster-wifi-/4
    Read carefully the speed of the USB drive plugged into the TC.

  • Using an external drive for my iTunes Library

    One post, many questions.
    Sometimes I inadvertently open iTunes with my external drive turned off. It holds my library contents.
    iTunes however, with no warning or message, just reverts the library location to my internal drive and throws whatever it wants to download there (usually a few podcasts).
    My bad, I know. I leave the drive turned off because I often don't need it for up to a week at a time. My iPod charges in the car as I drive around.
    I end up with my library split, all but a tiny bit of content over on the external drive hooked to my airport extreme, and that drive removed as the library location in iTunes.
    So I change the location, let iTunes reorganize my library, and go on my merry way. I'd like to make it not happen. No, leaving the drive on is not an option. The answer to the question "Do all your little light up boxes REALLY need to be on all the time?" is no. It's easier to turn some off, believe me.
    I moved the contents of "user"/music/iTunes/iTunes Music to the external drive. Downloads, Podcasts, and TV Shows folders live in there amongst the content. It works great unless I drop my iPod in the dock or otherwise start iTunes with that drive switched off.
    Is it safe to go into the original location and delete enough of the file structure to make iTunes at least say "hey! where's the library" rather than changing my set preferences and filing things where I don't want them?
    If I delete user/ Music/iTunes/*iTunes Music* from my internal drive will iTunes a. work? b. not see it, so just make a new iTunes Music folder and keep doing what it has been? or c. ask for a library location? (prompting me to turn the drive on)
    Should I recreate that naming structure to/on the external drive? Right now the path to the content is shared/airport extreme/OWC Media Storage, with the content then on the dedicated drive. When I send iTunes down this path what shows up as the library location is just OWC Media Storage: . The default iTunes loves so much does show the whole path Travelstar 200GB/user/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. Is part of the problem my just throwing the content on a drive I gave a non iTunes specific name?

    I noticed this is getting views so, I'm posting answers to myself if case it's helping someone else.
    I turned the external drive off and started iTunes on purpose to see what it's reaction would be.
    It does redirect itself to the original location, remake the iTunes Music folder on my internal drive, and start to download Podcasts.
    Is it possible to stop this? Can the path to the iTunes Music folder be locked? I'd actually rather iTunes crashed than reset itself this way.

  • Using iTunes on an external drive..

    So I know how to put my libary on an external drive and pull music from that. My problem is this: my external drive is connected to my airport extreme. I have two laptops that my fiance and I use and we both want to pull music off it. It works, but we're constnatly forgetting to "connect to the hub" via Finder. Consequentially, iTunes likes to make a new iTunes music folder on the laptops' HDs and then we have to go through the whole process again of updating the location, and letting iTunes organize it all...
    It's a pain in the butt.
    Any suggestions on what we can do so we don't have to deal this mess? iTunes sometimes even makes a new folder when the laptop is already connected to the external HD!
    The apple support page says this:
    "Additional Information
    If you move your library to an external drive, you'll need to power up and connect the drive before starting iTunes. If you don't, iTunes will prompt you to either locate the library or to create a new library (which will result in an empty library)."
    I'd really like it to ASK ME to find the library rather than making a brand new iTunes folder.
    I know people play music off their Time Capsule's like this, do you guys still have this problem or is your Time Capsule "automatically" connected to your computers? Any way to get my external Western Digital via the Aiport Extreme to do the same?

    Sure.
    First thing you're going to want to do is transfer everything to the external:
    MacMuse: Moving iTunes to a new drive
    Then, just make sure that the external drive is powered on and connected every time you start iTunes.

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