Itunes & external hard drives

Does anyone know if it would be possible to run Itunes on an external hard drive connected to a laptop via USB 2.0 ie store all music and Itunes on the hard drive?
I have no more memory left on my computer and I was hoping this would be an option.

Yes you can tasty chick...I ran into the same problem, and so I picked up a SimpleTech 120 GB external hard drive.
The trick is you need to assign the external hard drive a specific drive letter each time it is plugged into your laptop (or when you reboot). If you don't do this, then the external drive may get a different drive letter each time it is plugged in. This can be done by following the steps listed in this article at Microsoft's site (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844)...assuming you have XP. If you don't have XP, search the site for the steps to follow for your operating system.
After that, just follow the steps from this Apple.com article about how to move your iTunes music folder (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305451).
Once you're done you should be able to fill up that iPod bad boy!
Hope this helps,
Kiddka
Windows XP

Similar Messages

Itunes, external hard drive , and Time machine

Hello I am a college student at RIT with a problem
Right now I have my itunes library on an external hard drive that I leave plugged into my laptop, my friend recently installed the software for remote time machine backups on a file server in his room. I want to find a way to plug my external hard drive into that server to do time machine backups and store my itunes library remotely so I can access them anywhere on campus
How would I be able to do this in the easiest manner
Thanks

You may find more help in the TM forum, here.
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1227

Itunes & external hard drive questions "original file could not be found"

I recently got my first apple, a Powerbook G4, and I am trying to figure out how to store and access my music files that are on my external hard drive. I have some music stored on my laptop and the majority of it on the hard drive. I can play the files on my computer's hard drive(itunes finds them), but the files on the external hard drive will not play, unless i seek it out manually. The message says "the song could not be played because the original file couldn't be found. Would u like to locate it" My question is how to get the files in my library to play when they are stored on my external hard drive. Any advice would be appreciated.

There's something missing in your explanation. If you're getting the "original file..." message, that would indicate that you may have had all your music files on your laptop drive at one point and them moved some of them to the external drive without using the proper procedure.
If you don't have a lot of playlists, star ratings, and that sort of information that you're trying to preserve, then Mike's suggestion is an easy way out. If you do have a lot of that kind of information, then you may need to see if you can restore your setup to its former condition, when it was all working, and then use proper procedures to move files to the external drive or whatever it was that you were trying to do.

Trouble w/ iTunes & external hard drives: iTunes doesn't like to play nice

This is a story about my external hard drives and my macbook pro. Some time ago, I moved my itunes music folder with all of my songs and movies consolidated to it onto external hard drive #1, but kept my itunes organizational data on my macbook pro's internal hard drive. Life was good. I had more internal hard drive space on my macbook pro then ever because all my songs and movies were gone, and itunes worked flawlessly as long as hard drive #1 was connected.
To prepare for the future, I also dragged a copy of my itunes music folder with all my songs and movies in it onto hard drive #2 for safekeeping. Now, i had 2 copies of my itunes songs and movies, one on each hard drive. My insurance policy was in place. One day, hard drive #1 stopped mounting on my computer. It was time for old #1 leave me for the sweet peace of the afterlife. I bought a new hard drive, hard drive #3. I dragged my backup of hard drive #1's old files, including my itunes music folder with all of my songs and movies, from hard drive #2 to hard drive #3.
Now, my entire itunes data folder is sitting on hard drive #3 and yet itunes doesn't seem to want to play nice. All of my files have cute little exclamation marks next to them. When I double click on a song, iTunes pretends to be lost. It asks me to locate the mp3 and naturally I find it right in my iTunes music folder by searching for it, only this time it's sitting on hard drive #3 instead of hard drive #1. By going manually through my library this way, i could keep all playlists, play counts, ratings, and other lovely bits of data intact. However, this would take years, as my songs and movies number in the bajillions. If there isn't an easy solution I am missing, surely there must be a script or program that does this legwork for me, perhaps while I slumber.
No one on the internet seems to have this problem; everyone wants to use their ipods to restore their songs and movies. Since I own an iPod Touch, restoring the pitiful amount of files I have on it is a waste of my time, especially when all the files from my iPod are sitting right on little old hard drive #3 anyway. Citizens of the interwebs, here my plea: I require a solution to my problem of getting iTunes to recognize the folder of data it once interfaced with so seamlessly. I require a solution that does not destroy four years worth of playlists, and preferably not the "date added" data on my tracks either. All other data is fine for me to lose, but preferably not. I already know that finding the tracks manually keeps all data intact. My first inclination is that a solution to my problem may be to speed up that process. For those who seek an answer, as I do: godspeed, brave mac users. God.... godspeed.

This should work:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449?viewlocale=en_US
BE AWARE THOUGH:
I followed these steps and had a strange issue come up. I don't think it was at all related following the steps above. But just double check your music BEFORE you throw out any of the music from you computers hard drive.
Here's what happen.
Some of my music forgot what file type they were. I had some that decided to be plist others jpg others something else. It was totally random. And a HUGE pain to replace the music. But I worked through it.
Hope that helps.

ITunes + external hard drive + iPod movies = headache. Help?

Hey folks,
I'm in need of some assistance. In theory, this should work just fine. But iTunes and I have a history and it's not cooperating again.
Present setup:
-Macbook (with a hard drive that is almost full)
-Music is saved on Macbook
-All is well
What I want the setup to be:
-Brand new WD 500 GB External hard drive
-An iTunes folder has been created on the external drive
-All my music was copied from my laptop to the external drive into the iTunes folder
-iTunes was updated with the new location
-Everything is fine UNTIL I unplug the hard drive, at that point iTunes resets itself to the Macbook folder. When I plug the external drive back in I have to reset the preferences to that location again and it updates my iTunes library - which is a pain to say the least.
It gets slightly more complicated at this point ... I'm in the midst of moving roughly 60 movies onto my iPod. I have a folder on my external drive named "iPod Movies." I was able to transfer 27 movies onto my iPod just fine last night. Now, when I transferring movies into iTunes I get this error, "Attempting to copy to the disk "My Book" failed. The disk could not be read from or written to."
Basically, I want my external drive to be my iTunes/iPod drive and it certainly is not working that way. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Set your folder structure on the ext HD to mimic what is on your Mac - iTunes>iTunes Music> etc - then make sure that the iTunes Library and .xml files for the library are on the ext HD. Then when opening iTunes hold down the 'Option' key and direct iTunes to the ext HD.
MJ

Sudden iTunes/External Hard Drive problem...

Greetings,
I've got a strange one... for a long time, we've successfully used an external USB hard-drive to store children's videos. The drive is connected to a Mac Mini (PPC) running 10.5.6. And the Mini is connected to a TV. We use cover flow to pick the video and off it goes, using an alias that's linked to the original file on the External HD. No problems.
Then last night, I dragged a few new TV episode downloads to the hard drive. The "copying" progress bar never showed, and then I couldn't get the HD's folders to show in the Finder. I tried running Disk Utility, but it said it "could not unmount" the drive. A couple of reboots later (with Shift Key down and after quitting some processes in Activity Monitor)... I was able to unmount the drives.
I ran Disk Utility repair and fix permissions on both partitions of the external drive, and all seemed okay again. Only, today the kids were midway through watching "Bolt" (from the iTunes store)... and it suddenly froze. At the same time, the audio coming from iTunes sounded like a shuddering loud rattle noise. It was definitely coming from the audio of the file, since I could turn it up and down using the volume in iTunes.
Once that happened, I could quit the fullscreen video but couldn't get any of the other movies on the HD to run. They would all do the same thing. The external HD seems fine, however. It reads as needing no repairs both when connected to the Mini and when connected to my Macbook Pro.
I also ran Cocktail on the Mini, clearing the caches, fixing permissions again, running the maintenance scripts, etc. (I ran it on autopilot). Even rebooting after this didn't help. The video still freezes. And no, not always in the same spot.
Anybody have any ideas about what could be causing this?

Hi there,
I guess you're using 8.1?
I couldn't play songs anymore after the 8.1 update.
After switching off iTunesDJ (General Preferences) it could find my library again,
but it still functioned VERY s l o w l y. In the end I went back to v7.7.1. Now waiting for roy@apple to fix the problems with the 8.1.1 update.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Henk

Itunes/external hard drive issue - i cant find the answer anywhere

okay so here it is:
i am currently using an imac g5 (v. 10.4.8) and i just got a g-drive to store my music onto. i am using a 400 firewire cable and i have tried a few different methods to copy my music files to the drive (methods are listed here) but every time i transfer any song to the drive, it gives me this:
"the finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "file name" could not be read or written. (error code -36)."
i have looked through numerous forums about this problem and some have suggested to check the firewire connection but i doubt it's the connection because other files such as microsoft word documents or pictures can easily be transferred onto the drive without any problems.
my itunes library is comprised of mp3/m4a files.. some of which have been downloaded, others taken directly from my cds. i tried to see if this problem was occuring with my downloaded files (assuming some of them may be corrupted) but it's not the case because the error shows up with EVERY song I try to transfer onto the drive.
the problem MAY have something to do with the fact that... a long time ago, i tried to get rid of all my album artwork and i was looking through forums, and one of the solutions was to convert my files to "aac" (which can be done in the itunes preferences menu). however, i've tried converting some songs back to mp3 formats and transferring them again and it still doesn't work. also, one time i converted the id3 tags of the songs, but i dont think that has anything to do with it
this is the given information for one of my itunes songs if it's of any help:
i think i've tried just about everything, please help me! thank you
Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Some things to check:
What format is the drive? Is it formatted for OS X or for Windows? If windows is it FAT 32? Each of these have different naming conventions, different read and write capabilities. If your drive is only for use with your Mac, reformat it for Mac OS Journalled using disk utility.
This may also be a file permissions issue. As as we're not dealing with System Files here, Disk Utility is of no help.Try setting the permissions on the folder using BatchMod from
http://macchampion.com/arbysoft/
Regards
TD

Running iTunes from external hard drive, new computer, where to start?

I've seen several threads relating to this, but I'm a bit confused. For some time we have been running iTunes from an external hard drive with no issues. We now have a new laptop with windows 8, and I'm not sure where to start to set up iTunes (we replaced the computer with a laptop). Do I need to do a new install of iTunes on the laptop? Do I install it to the hard drive (C) or to the external drive (G)? My biggest source of concern is losing the library. I also want to be sure that we can continue to run iTunes from the external drive, I don't want it taking up space on the laptop hard drive.

With more & more people looking towards external drives as a storage solution, it's important to warn them, that although using one within iTunes is a great idea, it comes with its issues & can be a step towards a disastrous sequence. In such a scenario, each time iTunes is launched it'll look for the library that resides on the external drive, & if that drive's not connected, iTunes will open with an empty library. You know what's comming next, rite ? An empty iDevice. This happens because 'by default' iTunes is set to Auto-Sync & if you're using an external drive, the potential for a messy problem goes way up. So in short, remember these points. when using an external drive(library).
. Always connect your external drive prior to lauching iTunes.
. Always ensure iTunes sees your external library prior to connecting your iDevice.
. Disable the 'Auto-Sync' feature from within iTunes prior to connecting your iDevice.
. Always wait to connect your iDevice until thee aforementioned points are confirmed.
As stated earlier, using an external drive with iTunes isn't a problem in & by itself. But if the external drive's disconnected & the 'Auto-Sync' feature's left at its default setting(enabled), a family member could loose all their data simply by connecting their iDevice to the PC/Mac. Or be in for a time consuming lesson.
PS: At the very least one should research the topic themselves. http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/a/Itunes-External-Hard-Drive.htm

Can you file your iTunes movies on an external hard drive and still access them from itunes?

Can you move your Itunes movies from the hard drive on hte computer (C drive) to an external hard drive in order to free up space on your main hard drive (C drive)?

Yes.
I have a 5TB iTunes library stored on a Drobo 5D.
http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/a/Itunes-External-Hard-Drive.htm
It works perfectly.

I moved itunes file to external hard drive and want to move the file on my pc to recycle bin. When I move i get an error message that it cannot delete ituneshelper.dll access is denied. Can I move that file to the recycle bin?

I am trying to free up space on my pc and moving itunes files to external hard drive. I have followed instructions and believe I have file copied to new drive, but I am having trouble moving file to recycle bin as the instructions say. I am getting the following error message: cannot delete ituneshelper.dll:access denied, make sure disk is not full or write protected and file not in use. I know the file is not in use when trying to move. Any help would be most appreciated. I am on Windows XP.

Yes. And you should not have moved that folder. Put it back. To move your iTunes library move the folder from User's Music.
tt2

Erasing all music from iTunes and starting over from an external hard drive

Hello,
I tried moving all my media to an external hard drive to make room on my MacBook Pro and just be able to run the media (ie music movies etc) from the external hard drive when it was connected.
Well this backfired big time probably because I did not follow any sort of instructions.
1st I backed up Finder > music > iTunes > iTunesMedia folder to two seperate external hard drives just in case.
2nd I think (this was back in March 2013) I decided to cut/delete the folder Automatically Add to iTunes and moved it to one of my external hard drives (this folder for some reason contained mostly everythiing that was in the iTunes Media folder).
3rd I finally decided to erase content from iTunes Media Folder
4th I deleted the iTunes Media folder because I felt it was stupid to have a "iTunes Media folder" and "iTunes Music Folder" in the same place but not actually have anything in the iTunes Music folder (probably really stupid of me in retrospect)
5th I unchecked the box under iTunes > Preferences > Advanced "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
6th I believe I changed the location of "iTunes Media folder location" in the Advanced area under Preferences thinking this should be pointing to my external drive
I then believe I tried to run iTunes and play my content, but when I did all it did was copy my music/media back to my MacBook Pro hard drive but I did not realize it was doing this until later the next day when I tried to play some music and realized I had 3 copies of everything in my iTunes program (ie music movies podcasts tv shows etc) however, I could play all three versions of whatever it was I selected there was no "error message" saying that iTunes could not located that file, would you like to try and locate.
So I checked Finder to see if there were 3 copies of everything (by the way at this point I stopped connecting my external hard drive for the sake of making more copies on iTunes) but there wasn't??? So I tried to go through Option+View > Show Exact Duplicate Copies and delete all but one of the items. When I would delete them and it asked if I wanted to move them to my Trash Bin I clicked yes and all the 2nd and 3rd copies were gone!!! Yeah, so when I played those songs/movies that remained they would play!!!!!
Than I realized that my Internal Hard Drive was almost full and went looking around for things I could delete to help make my MacBook run better, and realized that my Trash had a large amount of data in it and that emptying it would significantly reduce space on my Internal Hard Drive, but when I went back to iTunes and selected music or movies to play it placed the infamous "!" next to that track or movie and it could not locate those items anymore?
Long long long story short hopefully, can anyone help me set up iTunes so that it only can play content/media off of my external drive and not take up space on my internal hard drive? Is this even possible to do that or will always start to copy those files from the external hard drive back onto the internal hard drive? and second is there anyway to use the Apple router external hard drive to use as the source for all my media?
PS I am running Mac OS X Lion version 10.7.5 and iTunes 11.1.3 (8) 64-bit

2012EVOL wrote:
Hello,
I tried moving all my media to an external hard drive to make room on my MacBook Pro and just be able to run the media (ie music movies etc) from the external hard drive when it was connected.
Quit iTunes.
Copy the entire /Music/iTunes/ folder to the external. Don't only copy the iTunes media folder.
Hold Option, launch iTunes, select Choose library... and select the iTunes folder on the external.
This is all you need to do.
Everything for iTunes (except the application) is on the external.
2nd I think (this was back in March 2013) I decided to cut/delete the folder Automatically Add to iTunes and moved it to one of my external hard drives (this folder for some reason contained mostly everythiing that was in the iTunes Media folder).
Make a shortcut to this folder on your desktop.
Nothing should be in this folder. When you put a file here, it will get moved by iTunes and added to the library.
The reason it had files in it is because you moved it.

Files moved to external hard drive - now nothing playing in iTunes...help!

*Hi guys,*
*Just wondering if someone can give me some advice really. I think / know I've made a bit of a botch up of my files :-(*
*Here's the story - I'll try to be brief...I have done a number of different things to try and sort this mess out and this is the latest...*
*- Laptop storage full, with over 5000 music files saved on it. Laptop unhappy - says needs more space. I try to accommodate.*
*- Already have all music files backed up on external storage drive. Nice. Delete music files in C:/Program Files/iTunes file. Laptop happy - has enough space.*
*- Delete current iTunes music files. Drag and drop music files from external hard drive into iTunes window. Transfers music. No problem.*
*- Add new files to external hard drive - try to update in iTunes. iTunes not happy - shows exclamation marks by most songs, which then won't play.*
*- iTunes only opened with external hard drive connected and working.*
*- Me now not happy.*
*- Try changing path where library is saved. Does nothing useful.*
*- Only available option is to click on each track and manually locate it. Not fun when there are 600+ files.*
*- Decide to drag and drop files into iTunes window again.*
*- Now ended up with 12000 tracks in my iTunes, half of which are duplicates with exclamation marks that won't play.*
*- Now at end of my tether. Takes hours to move tracks and now using up unecessary room with unplayable tracks.*
*Does anyone know a. where I went wrong (given I've faffed around with it so much...I just want it organised once and for all...) and more importantly, b. what I can do to sort this mess out.*
*Is it actually possible to have all your music stored externally but to have them play through iTunes to transfer onto my iPod???*
*Also, if I used my iPod as a disk drive, and copied the files straight onto there from my hard drive, would they actually play, thus ruling out iTunes altogether?*
*Many thanks in advance.*
*Frustrated MP3 wrangler*

*Also...is there any way I can filter out all the tracks with the ! so I can delete the unplaying copies as they're taking up room in my iTunes? I know how to find duplicates, but then I have to go and delete each one individually...*
*Thank you!*

I cannot access iTunes songs showing in external hard drive

I recently closed my dropbox account and moved its content to an external hard drive. This included iTunes songs and now the songs and related albums no longer show in iTunes when I open it up, although I can see the individual songs (but not in albums) in the external hard drive. There are a limited number of albums still showing when I open up iTunes but they are albums I have recently added to iTunes.
However I can see the albums and tracks in the iTunes media folder on my Mac internal hard drive, but they do not show up when I actually open up Itunes.I have followed advice found on this website and have tried to move my iTunes folder to the external drive so all the music is in one place, but i keep getting an 'error code 50' message appearing. I have also tried to select the individual songs on the hard drive and move them to the media folder but there are no 'albums' to move them into and they just sit there as individual songs. I have a macbook air which is one year old and a WD My Passport ultra 1TB external hard drive. I am using OSX version 10.9.5 with 8GB of memory. As you can tell from my endeavours, I do not really understand the way iTunes works and it may be that the various songs and albums in the media folder need to be organised in a different way perhaps, so that they are visible when I open up iTunes?
As I have lots of space on my external hard drive and am running out of space on my Mac hard drive, ideally I would like all my iTunes folders to be held on my external drive, as it is always plugged in to my Mac, and for iTunes to be 'pointed' to the hard drive. Any advice please?
Thanks
Elizabeth

All kinds of things going on.
About the error code. Do you men "50" or do you mean "-50"? It is critical things get reported exactly here. Error -50 is a very unhelpful generic communications error with a number of possible causes. Something between the drive to which you are downloading and the drive from which it is all coming is not working correctly, with probably dozens of possibilities. I guess one simple possibility is if this is a brand new drive it likely came formatted for Windows use and needs reformatting for Mac.
Kappy's brief drive formatting instructions (12/2012) - https://discussions.apple.com/message/20571091#20571091
Pondini: Formatting, Partitioning, Verifying, and Repairing Disks... - http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html, specifically http://pondini.org/OSX/DU1.html
Basic workings of iTunes. When you add a file to iTunes it puts the file in a specific location designated in you Media Folder preferences setting and makes a note in a database file (library.itl) of where it put it. When you want to play the track iTunes looks up where the file should be, goes there and plays that file. iTunes does not inventory its media folder for new additions. For iTunes to recognize tracks they have to be added to iTunes either by importing, dragging to iTunes, or dragging to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder. If files added to iTunes are later moved by you in Finder, particularly to another drive, iTunes loses track of them completely and give you a broken link indicator " ! ".
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391
iTunes 9 [and later]: Understanding iTunes Media Organization - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3847 - plus supplemental information about organizing to new structure https://discussions.apple.com/message/26404702#26404702
Image of folder structure and explanation of different iTunes versions (turingtest2 post) - https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-7392 and making an iTunes library portable.
I don't know exactly how Dropbox works but basically by moving all your files instead of letting iTunes do the relocating you have broken all the links to your older files in iTunes. You can either repair them one by one, by one, by one.... or you can rebuild your library, or essentially create a new library and start over again (you did read those links I provided didn't you?). If you are prepared to start over, hold down the option key while starting iTunes. Create a new library on the external drive. Drag all your media files to the Automatically Add to iTunes folder in the iTunes folder on that drive.

How can i save my individual playlist on itunes on my external hard drive because i want to buy a laptop and install itunes and move all my music and playlist thats on my desktop to my laptop and almost all my music is from a bunch of cd's i own

how can i save my individual playlist on itunes on my external hard drive because i want to buy a laptop and install itunes and move all my music and playlist thats on my desktop to my laptop and almost all of my music is from a bunch of cds i own

Hello ryane84
The easiest and most efficient way to copy your music is to follow the steps under the External drive section. Make sure that you have organized the iTunes library first before you copy it over. Then put the copied iTunes folder in the same Music folder on your computer.
iTunes: How to move your music to a new computer
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4527
Regards,
-Norm G.

I have a new Windows tablet computer with limited hard drive space, and cannot transfer my itunes library to the hard drive. Can I run t media from an external hard drive? If so, how do I transfer my files?

I have a new Windows tablet computer with limited hard drive space (32 GB), and cannot transfer my itunes library to the hard drive. Can I run itunes from an external hard drive? I have tried to follow some of the directions on this site, but am having no success. Thanks.

iTunes will run fine with the media on an external drive.
However, I suggest that a tablet computer with a tiny hard drive is not ideal as the primary computer for managing an iTunes library, even a small one. If you have another machine, perhaps a big, boxy, inexpensive old desktop with a decent amount of storage, that might be a better choice.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

Itunes & external hard drives

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