How can I get Itunes to just create a route to an external hard drive instead of copying all my music onto my internal disc?

Question

I have been trying to start using Itunes again, I have a large amount of music on external hard drives and not a large amount of disc space, on my windows version Itunes could use it's library in the hard drive so Itunes would use a directory path to the song file. When trying to import onto my Macbook Air it keeps trying to copy the song files, resulting in a message that says I haven't got enough disc space.
Any Ideas?
Kind Regards,
MEJM1

Answer 1

One approach:
Open the menu Edit > Preferences...
Select the Advanced tab.
Uncheck Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library.
This will stop iTunes from wanting to copy everything onto the internal drive any time you add content. This is marginally easier than remembering to hold down the ALT key, however in this scheme iTunes Store purchases, podcasts etc. would still end up on the internal drive.
Alternatively you can store the entire library on the external drive. Close iTunes if it is open, then copy the existing iTunes folder from your profile to the root of the external drive. Click the icon to launch iTunes and immediately hold down the Option key so that you get the following dialog box:
Click Choose Library... browse to /iTunes on the external drive and select the library file iTunes Library. Now that library is on the external you can move any new content you want to add to the library into the folder /iTunes/iTunes Media/Automatically add to iTunes to have it added to the library and organized by it without creating duplicates, or filling up the internal drive.
Ideally you should get another drive so that you can make a backup copy of your library on a separate physical disk.
tt2