Moving the music to an external drive

I want to move all my music, books and movies onto my external drive but I can't figure out how to do it. I copied the music and the library files over, I held down he alt key while opening the Itunes program but when I direct it to the external drive it tells me that its an invalid directory. Can someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks

Stu, I'd suggest you start a new topic with your issue (use the "Post a new topic" link at the top of each main topic page). It's generally better to ask a question as a new topic rather than as a reply in someone else's thread. It just becomes too difficult to try and answer questions from more than one person in a single thread; it quickly gets confusion who's asking and answering what. It's more courteous to the original poster, and is more likely to get your question the attention it deserves.
Regards.

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HT203167 Moved huge music library to external drive...now iTunes cannot find it

My massive music library was taking up all the room on my hard drive, so I moved everything to an external drive. I then deleted the library from my hard drive.
The music is located in a folder named "iTunes Music" on my external drive. iTunes cannot locate the songs now.
I've changed the media folder in preferences to: volumes/externalharddrive/iTunes Music and it still won't play the songs.
I've also tried selecting "Get Info" by right-clicking on a song, then manually directing iTunes to song. It will play that individual song, and asks me if I want to use the folder to find other songs. I click "Yes", but it's still not working.
Any ideas? I've searched these forums and I'm stumped.
Thanks!

Our iTunes guru Terence Devlin advises the following:
1. Quit iTunes
2. Drag the iTunes folder from your internal hd - located in ~/Music folder - to your external hd. DO NOT delete the original one from your internal hd... yet!
3. When the transfer is complete, press and hold the Option(alt) key and fire up iTunes.
4. A "Choose iTunes Library" window will come up. Click on the "Choose Library" button.
5. Navigate to where the iTunes folder is located in the external hd.
6. Within the iTunes folder, select the iTunes Library file and click Choose...
That's it. iTunes will now display all your playlists, songs, movies, podcasts etc. At this point, should you wish, you can delete the iTunes folder from the internal hd to free up space.
More info:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751
Or if you prefer a more complicated explanation:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to -a-new-hard-drive

I have 60 000 songs on a hard drive. The songs are referenced to the media file and not stored in the media file. I have moved the songs to another external drive. The itunes library has lost the link to the media files. How can I restore the links?

I have all my songs (60 000) on a remote drive. The drive is wireless networked. I installed a new router and had to map the drive again. Once this was done itunes could no longer locate the music. My music is not sitting in my media file but is rather referenced to the location of the music. Now that the location has changed due to the remapped drive how can I link the itunes library to the songs (media)again.
I have read many help comments and forums but so far nothing specific about relinking once the songs have already been moved and are referenced songs.
A step by step procedure would be helpful.
Thank you
Graham

I've uploaded a newer version that might catch that error. For some background on the script look at this thread.
iTunes remembers the location of each file in the database. If you right-click on a missing file, click Get Info, cancel when it asks you to try to find it, then look on the summary tab it will show you the last known location in the form file://localhost/<some path>. If you put the files back where they are expected to be, close iTunes and reopen, then iTunes will find them again. If not my script can attempt the task. When the script asks for a media folder you should respond with Z:\ since that seems to be where the artist folders are located.
tt2

Moving iPhoto to external drive; have formatted external disk to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), moved the iPhoto library to external drive; when trying to change the library, the iPhoto file on new external is greyed out can't be selected.What went wrong?

Must have done something wrong..
1. formatted external disk to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - required a partition, but that went fine. Entire new external disk was included in the partition formatted to Mac OS Extneded (journaled).
2. moved iPhoto library to new external disk
3. Holding Option key down, opened iPhoto
4. Choose library feature appeared, however when new library function option appeared and "choose library" selected, the iPhoto folder appearing in the new external drive was greyed out and not able to be selected. Therefore the default library remains the original iphoto library on the Mac.
I've moved the original iphoto library to the trash and then tried to start iPhoto. A message comes up that the iPhoto is in the trash and needs to be pulled out before iPhoto can start (clearly the new iphoto library on the external drive is not being seen.
Can anyone suggest where I went awry? Thanks!

Try trash the com.apple.iPhoto.plist file from the HD/Users/ Your Name / library / preferences folder.
(On 10.7 or later: Hold the option (or alt) key while clicking on the Go menu in Finder to access the User Library)
(Remember you'll need to reset your User options afterwards. These include minor settings like the window colour and so on. Note: If you've moved your library you'll need to point iPhoto at it again.)
What's the plist file?
For new users: Every application on your Mac has an accompanying plist file. It records certain User choices. For instance, in your favourite Word Processor it remembers your choice of Default Font, on your Web Browser is remembers things like your choice of Home Page. It even recalls what windows you had open last if your app allows you to pick up from where you left off last. The iPhoto plist file remembers things like the location of the Library, your choice of background colour, whether you are running a Referenced or Managed Library, what preferences you have for autosplitting events and so on. Trashing the plist file forces the app to generate a new one on the next launch, and this restores things to the Factory Defaults. Hence, if you've changed any of these things you'll need to reset them. If you haven't, then no bother. Trashing the plist file is Mac troubleshooting 101.
Then try select it again.

Moving ITunes Music to New Hard Drive

Hi! I would like to free up space on my internal hard drive by purchasing an external one this weekend and moving the music files to this drive. I read this article: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748 and I still have just one more question. I am not sure if others ended up having a library that looks like this, but in addition to the organized folders (by artist) in the ITunes folder, in C:\Documents and Settings\Dana Christine\My Documents\My Music there are about 100 MP3 files (not organized, just sitting there) which are a part of my library. How can I go about getting these files moved over as well? Will the process described in the link I attached take care of moving these files also? No tutorials on moving files that I have seen has covered such an issue. I really appreciate your help.

If these MP3 files are in the iTunes library (you can play them in iTunes), they will get copied when you Consolidate library.

Why can't iTunes find the music from an external hard drive?

I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music. I have to go through and manually select a song for it to find it one and then it says should it use this to find the rest of the songs. Then it crashes. I have reinstalled iTunes tonight with no real improvement. I want to be able to create a playlist to upload to my new iPad as well as updating music on my iPod but I can't do any of it. Please, any advice!

angelafromlanchester wrote:
I moved my music to an external hard drive to free up space on my old laptop. Since I moved to a new laptop, iTunes never seems to find the music.
Has the new laptop given the external drive a different drive letter?
The "missing file" error happens if the file is no longer where iTunes expects to find it. Possible causes are that you or some third party tool has moved, renamed or deleted the file, one of its parent folders, or the drive it lives on has had a change of drive letter. It is also possible that iTunes has changed from expecting the files to be in the pre-iTunes 9 layout to post-iTunes 9 layout, or vice-versa, and so is looking in slightly the wrong place.
Select a track with an exclamation mark, use Ctrl-I to Get Info, then click No when asked to try to locate the track. (Due to a bug in iTunes 12 you currently have to say No twice!) Look on the summary tab for the location that iTunes thinks the file should be. Now take a look around your hard drive(s). Hopefully you can locate the track in question. If a section of your library has simply been moved, a folder renamed, or a drive letter has changed, it should be possible to reverse the actions. If the difference between the two paths is an additional Music folder in one path then this is a layout issue. I can explain further if that is the case.
In some cases iTunes may be able to repair itself if you go through the same steps with Get Info but this time click Locate and browse to the lost track. It may then offer to attempt to automatically fix other broken links.
If another application like Windows Media Player has moved/renamed the files then the chances are that subtle differences in naming strategies will make it hard to restore the media to the precise path that iTunes is expecting. In such cases, as long as the missing files can be found somewhere, you should be able to use my FindTracks script to reconnect them to iTunes. See this post for an explanation of how it works.
tt2

Moved music folder to external drive, how do I get Match/ITunes to recognise it?

Hi guys,
I've been rather stupid in restoring my computer. I moved all the music to an external harddrive before I restored my PC but forgot to bring the Itunes library file with it. I've got ITunes Match so I can stream all my songs, but is there anyway to get it to recognise the songs on my external drive? I've tried re-importing them into ITunes but it adds each song as a duplicate, so I have the Match version and then my harddrive version, I really don't want duplicates of all 7000 odd songs! Likewise I'd like to try to avoid having to download everything from Match as this will take ages and be a bit of a pain! The only reason I care is so I can use my Sonos system with my laptop, otherwise I'd just leave them all on Match. Any ideas?
Thanks, Luke

You will need the iTunes Library.itl file which generally lives in ~/Music/iTunes/. You can recover this from the backups you were making before the HDD died. Otherwise, you cannot recreate the library.

I'm having issues syncing my ipod to my external hardrive's library. How do I sync and get the music from my external hard drive?

I recently moved the music from my old computer in itunes to my external hardrive (changed the media file location and consolidated library). I connected my external hardrive to my new computer (windows 7) and changed my itunes media file to my external hardrive and consolidated my new computer's library to my external hardrive. When I connect my iPod, it is only grabbing the music from my new computer and not my external hardrive. How do I get the music from my external hardrive onto my iPod?

Did you move the entire /Music/iTunes/ folder?
File > Add folder to library and select the folder with music on the external.

How can I play the music on my external hard drive with my laptop?

Look before everyone points out that this has been asked lots of times before, I wanted to state that in this particular case it might be a little bit more complicated. You see I think I've been an idiot.
I backed up all my physical music onto my external hard drive, but only the physical music. So now I have my nice new laptop and haven't got a clue how to play the music off my external hard drive, since I don't have an itunes library on my external hard drive.
Anyway any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Am I being a plonker, but it doesn't seem as simple as that. If I try and import via itunes it seems to want me to select the individual music file not the folder which holds all the music.
Also if I simply import it, won't my mac copy the files from my external hard drive back on to my laptop? Which makes me think I change the location where all the music is stored in itunes...?
Thanks for the help!

Moving iTunes library to an external drive that already has music on it?

I want an external drive that contains music to be designated as my iTunes library. How do I do it?
Note: I do not want to move an existing library to the external drive, just start fresh with the library on the drive.
Thanks!

pbay wrote:
I want an external drive that contains music to be designated as my iTunes library. How do I do it?
Note: I do not want to move an existing library to the external drive, just start fresh with the library on the drive.
welcome to the discussion area, pbay !
1) launch iTunes with the option key pressed. choose to create a new library when prompted.
2) in preferences > advanced make sure iTunes is pointed to the external drive and that +keep iTunes media folder organized+ and +copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library+ are checked.
3) from the iTunes file menu, choose +add to library+ and start populating iTunes with the tunes you want.
when you have added all tunes to your new library, make sure they play fine. right-click on random files and +get info+. look at the summary tab and check if the path leads to the correct location (your external drive).
when satisfied, the original files can be deleted.
happy computing ...

I recently moved my music to an external hd. I deleted the music from the internal. When i plug in the External,itunes doesnt pick it up. I have pointed itunes towards external but still not working,driving me nuts!

I recently moved my music to an external hd. I deleted the music from the internal. When i plug in the External,itunes doesnt pick it up. I have pointed itunes towards external but still not working,driving me nuts!

LeoGets wrote:
I recently moved my music to an external hd.
the best way would be to copy the entire iTunes folder (not just the iTunes music or media folder) from <MacintoshHD>/users/<yourname>/music on your Mac to the external, then launch iTunes while holding the option (⌥) key, click on choose library when prompted, and select the iTunes folder on the external.
I have pointed itunes towards external but still not working,driving me nuts!
that tells iTunes where to put new additions to your library, not where the content currently is.

I cannot download the update for itunes - music stored on external drive - download error state invalid "H" drive ? anyone have any ideas ? Cheers

I cannot download the update for itunes - music stored on external drive as computer got full up - download error state invalid "H" drive ? anyone have any ideas ? Cheers

See "Invalid drive X:\" install errors.
tt2

How can I put part od the iTunes music library of iTunes music on an external drive in order to free up disk space?

How can I put part od the iTunes music library of iTunes music on an external drive in order to free up disk space?

see this
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364
Peace, Clyde

Is it possible to set a default music player for the music on my external hard drive while still keeping my iTunes the default player on my Mac ?

Is it possible to set a default music player for the music on my external while still keeping my iTunes the default player on my Mac ?
Message was edited by: Pellseidon

There is no setting in the iPhone to set another default music player. The default is Music. If you are using another application, you are at the mercy of how that application operates as far as what occurs when it stops or errors out. The car is looking for music to play.

How can I save some music locally and the rest to an external drive or NAS?

I love my MBP w/ 16 GB RAM and SSD drive EXCEPT ... the SSD drive is lacking storage.
I'm trying to find a way to store select songs/photos/videos locally and the rest on an external drive or better yet a NAS, while still getting the convenient use of iPhoto and iTunes. Ideally, I would configure certain albums/playlists to stay local while the full library of media is on the external storage and when I plug in my iPhone/iPad the new photos/videos would upload to the external storage.
Has anyone discovered a way to do this?
Do I need to consider other programs like Lightroom to pull this off?

Setting it up the way you have with the library on the internal and just the media on the external makes it a lot more tricky to move things around. If it was all on the external you could do in the time it takes to copy the files plus about 20 seconds.
You can use the same library file, except in that file are references pointing to the media files on the USB drive. Are you planning on doing this with the same USB drive that you are using right now>? It is possible it may work. If the configuration is that you have SongA on USB drive Fred, as long as the drive remains named Fred then you should be able to move it to a different point of attachment. If you are planning on using a different USb drive you can try renaming the new USB drive to the exact same name as the existing one and maybe trick iTunes into not noticing the difference.
This is where having as much detail as possible when posting an issue is helpful so we don't have to consider every possible configuration.

Moving the music to an external drive

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