ITunes Library in an external hard drive

Question

I am a new user to mac's and i am converting from a dell. I had all my music on a external hard drive and i was able to add all of my music from the external hard drive into iTunes but from here it does not let me edit the information for each individual song. As I tried to figure out the problem i saw that the folder my music was in in the hard drive had a lock on it and said that it was read only. I feel as though if i could figure out how to unlock the folder and i guess make it read and write i would be able to edit the songs in the itunes library...thank you for your help

Answer 1

Greg Metzger wrote:
after hitting get info on the external hard drive it says that the format is windows NT File System (NTFS)
Ah ha! There is the problem. Mac, being the wonderful machines that they are, can read a lot more formats than Windows boxes can. They can read and write to the various Mac formats of course and they can read and write to FAT formatted volumes (DOS format). However NTFS format is a Windows format that Macs only have READ access. So those drives show up and can be accessed just fine by the Mac to read or copy off ot. However there is NOT any write access to NTFS volumes.
So your problem is you are trying to write to a read only volume. If you want to continue to use the external drive on the Mac, it will need to be reformatted. Use Mac format if you will only use it on the Mac or use DOS format if you think you might be swapping it between Mac and Windows computers.
Patrick