Multiple Libraries with same artists on external hard drive

I have saved about 5 seperate iTunes libraries and have now gotten them all on the same external hard drive. I have aprox 19000 tracks at about 168gb. The libraries r kind of a mess and I'm wondering if there's a shortcut to organizing files. Otherwise this is gonna take forever.

You need to turn on Sharing for the external drive - Select the external drive. Press COMMAND-I to open the Get Info window and check the Shared box. If the drive is connected to your computer then turn on File Sharing in your Sharing preferences and list your wife's username for access.
You might also wish to read iTunes- Setting up Home Sharing on your computer as well as just sharing the library using the iTunes' Sharing preferences.
Also, see iTunes- How to share music between different accounts on a single computer.

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Editing with media on an external hard drive

I would like to edit with media on an external hard drive without importing it, like you can do in FCP. It seems like a waste of hard drive space to copy it to another folder on the same drive, or any other drive, and I certainly don't want to edit with the media on my laptop hard drive.
Terry Kelley

Hi Terry,
This can be done by creating an iMovie Library on your external hardrive, as detailed in the article linked below.
iMovie (2013): Work with multiple libraries
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH14745
Cheers,
Allen

Multiple itunes libraries on same computer and removable hard drives

I have multiple itunes libraries, one resides on my internal hard drive on my computer and the other on a removable hard drive that I pug into the ocmputer via a USB cable, can itunes recognize both libraries at once, and how do I get it to do that?

That *****, apple should add a feature that allows multiple libraries.....hopefully they will in thenext release of iTunes.

Trouble getting iTunes to sync with music on my external hard drive

PLEASE HELP ME! I recently moved all of my music to my external hard drive to free up space on my computer. I have all the original files on my hard drive now, but (perhaps stupidly) deleted all the files from my actual computer. Now, I'm afraid I can't get all my ratings, last time played, number of plays, playlists, etc. back.
This is basically what I did:
1. Moved music from computer to External
2. In my iTunes preferences menu, I changed my "iTunes Music Folder Location" to the same original folder on my external hard drive.
My problem is that after I did that, iTunes didn't automatically add all my files back into the program. Now, it seems like I've got to add everything back one by one and everything without my customized info (#plays, recently played/added, rating, playlists, etc).
Will someone please just talk to me about this since AppleCare represetatives refuse to deal with problems that have absolutely anything to do with products that aren't made by them....even though I bought the thing at an Apple Store. I'm not sure if I'm giving the right info...I just need someone to ask me the right questions! PLEASE!

Here's Apple's method of moving your Music Folder:
iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder
It refers to iTunes 4 but works for iTunes 6. Notice step 14. Leave the iTunes Library & iTunes Music Library files in the ~/Music/iTunes folder on your internal HD. This is where iTunes, also other iLife apps, expect to find them.
What are the iTunes library files?

ILife with both internal and external hard drives?

I've been considering switching from a homebrew, multi-boot desktop to a MacBook for my primary computer, in part so I can hang out with my family in the living room rather than be exiled to the home office when I want to compute.
But here's my concern: I have media. We have about 50 GB of iTunes; maybe 30 GB of iPhoto; and tons and tons of digital video that would be stored in iMovie. Obviously the libraries are all interlinked. And it's all growing. I also like to rip DVDs and re-encode them for my iPod and AppleTV. Right now, my desktop has 480 GB of internal storage and that's just about enough.
I have discovered that the MacBook only comes with an option up to 250 GB. I absolutely need AppleCare, so I can't get an aftermarket hard drive. (All my Macs break - this one from the office that I'm on right now has a bum DVD drive, and my wife's has needed both fan and logic board replacements.)
While I'm aware of the existence of external hard drives, I'm concerned about Apple's non-external-hard-drive-friendly way of storing iLife data. If I wanted to keep more recent or useful music and photos on the internal drive but older stuff on an external, and still be able to use iLife seamlessly, would that be possible? (I see myself editing recent video in the living room, but then hooking back into the external HD in the office if I need older stuff.)
What solutions are out there for integrating data stores on both internal and external hard drives into an iLifestyle?
Thanks!

Sascha Segan1 wrote:
.. What solutions are out there for integrating data stores on both internal and external hard drives into an iLifestyle?
all iApps (iPhoto, iTunes, iM08) support usage of external drives as 'mass storage' devices.. you can tell all apps which drive to use for the Libraries.. there some tools out there, which even allow the usage of 2/many different Libraries in iTunes/iPhoto..
for iM in detail: the Projects are small files, and should stay internal (allthough I'm discribing a 'hack' on my site: http://karsten.schluter.googlepages.com/im08tricks Project Library (and Events) on External Harddrive); the Events (=GBs) could be located on as much ext. HDDs as you want..
but ...
all iApps are single-user .. you can NOT 'share' Libraries to 2/many different users; the idea of a 'media server' which hosts/shares all kind of data to all kind of users is not 'on concept' of iLife ..

Time machine with WD portable 250gb external hard drive

im using the WD 250GB external hard drive to backup my HD...im very new to MAC and time machine. I have a MacBookPro. My question: do you recommend i back everything up with time machine on this external WD HD? thanks for your help

OK, I understand now. I think the following may be helpful:
Basic Backup
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. PsynchX 2.1.1 and RsyncX 2.1 (Freeware)
6. Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware - 3.0 is a Universal Binary)
7. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
8. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
9. Data Backup (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Although you can buy a complete FireWire drive system, you can also put one together if you are so inclined. It's relatively easy and only requires a Phillips head screwdriver (typically.) You can purchase hard drives separately. This gives you an opportunity to shop for the best prices on a hard drive of your choice. Reliable brands include Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. You can find reviews and benchmarks on many drives at Storage Review.
Enclosures for FireWire and USB are readily available. You can find only FireWire enclosures, only USB enclosures, and enclosures that feature multiple ports. I would stress getting enclosures that use the Oxford chipsets (911, 921, 922, for example.) You can find enclosures at places such as;
Cool Drives
OWC
WiebeTech
Firewire Direct
California Drives
NewEgg
All you need do is remove a case cover, mount the hard drive in the enclosure and connect the cables, then re-attach the case cover. Usually the only tool required is a small or medium Phillips screwdriver.
If you have any questions about this please ask. Obviously you can also use TM as your backup system letting it run with its defaults. TM will initially back up everything. Thereafter it does only incremental backups - it backs up only those files that have changed since the last backup. Currently TM backs up every hour, week, and month. If the backup drive becomes full TM is supposed to remove the earliest version of a file to make space for the latest version. You can find third-party utilities such as TimeMachineEditor or TimeMachine Scheduler - VersionTracker or MacUpdate - that will let you change the schedule intervals if you prefer not to have backups running so frequently. You can also add files and/or folders to an exclusion list in TM for items you don't want to backup such as the /System/ folder.
However, TM cannot make bootable backups. If you want a bootable backup you will need to use something other than TM. Several of the ones I suggest above do bootable backups, incremental backups, scheduled backups, and archival backups.

Photo Smart 8250 Conflicts With Seagate Free Agent External Hard Drive

I recently installed a Seagate Free Agent External hard drive. The hard drive will not work when my printer is connected. I checked Device Manager and found that both the printer and the hard drive load a USB Mass Storage device driver that is the same version number. If I unplug the printer the driver is removed from Device manager and the hard drive works fine. Should the printer load a USB Mass Storage device driver when it is connected?

Welcome to Apple Support Communities
Of course. Your external drive compatibility depends on the file format it uses.
You won't have any problem reading your external drive because exFAT, FAT32 and NTFS are compatible with OS X. However, if your external drive is formatted with NTFS, you won't be able to write in it. You will notice it when you try to copy data to your external drive from the iMac. If that happens, you have two options:
1. Use a third-party application like Parallels NTFS.
2. Format the external drive with exFAT or FAT32. You have to do this in a PC. Copy your data to the internal disk of your computer before formatting the external disk.
If the external disk is formatted in FAT32 or exFAT, your external disk will work correctly

Sync-ing iTunes with another Mac &/or external hard drives?

Can u use iSync or another app 2 sync iTunes music between 2 different macs &/or an external HD? If so how? I have an eMac & an iBook & it's a pain in the a@@ 2 always have to transfer music files back & forth using an external HD or downloading 2xs. Does anyone else have this problem & agree?

No, you cannot - using either iSync, .Mac Sync or the Backup application available to .Mac registered users.
iSync synchronizes only Calendars and Contacts, with mobile handsets and Palm handheld organizers or smartphones.
.Mac Sync synchronizes only Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts, Keychains,
Mail Accounts and Mail Rules, Signatures and Smart Mailboxes with other Macintosh desktop and portable computers through .Mac, and with the .Mac servers themselves.
Backup will back up and restore your iTunes library to and from .Mac, external hard drives or removable media, but will not synchronize your library.
You are really asking the question in the wrong forum. You should consider posting your message in of the subcategories of the iTunes forum, here:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=149
You could use an application like ChronoSync to synchronize your libraries, but you are liable to get the best advice about iTunes synchronization in the iTunes discussion areas. More information about ChronoSync is available here:
http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/ChronoSync/chrono_overview.html

Problem with backing up to external hard drive and then " recovering " files, apps etc.

Hi there,
I hope you can help me please, I have messed some things up from not knowing what I was doing : ( and would like to fix them if possible.
I will try to be brief and concise. Here goes....
1. My 2006 iMac 4 running Leopard OSX was starting to run very slowly. My hard drive had 232 GB of which 220 GB were being used. The thing using most space was iPhoto, over 60 GB of photos.
2. I downloaded Mackeeper and ran their cleaning program, getting rid of duplicate files, clearing caches etc. but it didn't release much extra space, just a couple of gigs.
3. I read an article from Maclife " 25 ways to speed up your Mac ". One of the tips was to reinstall the operating system which I did, using the " archive and install " instruction.
4. I now have Leopard OS under a new account name which is running faster but I cannot access various apps such as iPhoto, Photoshop CS4, Keynote, Pages etc.
5. Everything prior to me messing around is now in a folder called " previous system ".
6. I realize now that I should have first bought a new external hard drive, which I now have done ; an Iomega 500 GB with USB 2.0 and that I should have backed up everything first before messing around. Hindsight is a great thing.
7. Having connected the ext. hard drive, I was looking for info on what I should do next when Time Machine kicked in and automatically started copying everything, without me having to do anything such as formatting etc.
8. Everything that was on the hard drive ( 220 GBs ) has been copied to the ext. HD so I hope I haven't lost anything, especially my photos on iPhoto and CS4.
9. Other 3rd party apps haven't been effected but now I would like to integrate everything back into one seamless, quick flowing system.
10. How can I do this ?
Any advice or help would be appreciated.
Thanks, Sean.

UPDATE : I have re-installed from disk, various apps that were no longer functioning such as iLife, iWork etc. So, I now can access my photos again.
Also, I had to re-install all the software for my printer ( Stylus Pro 4880 ) and reset it so the printer is working again.
Photoshop CS4 won't open. I think I will have to get in touch with Adobe as basically, I guess they have a built-in "blocker" which prevents me from opening the app as the license is for only 1 user and having re-installed the OS, there are now, in effect, 2 users ( Me and Me 1, I think ).
So, having added on a new external HD, Time Machine has made a copy of most of the files, folders, apps etc onto the external HD. The internal HD is still nearly full ( 220 GBs out of 232 GBs ).
I am guessing the way to go now in order to free up space on the internal HD is to delete/trash older photos from my iPhoto library and hope that if needed, I will be able to access them on the external HD.
Am I correct ? Please advise before I do something I will regret.
Thanks, Sean.

How do I replace my old external hard drive with a new larger external hard drive and move my music so itunes can find it?

How do I move music from an old external hard drive to a new external hard drive and have itunes find it?

If you have a time machine back up of your current drive you can do this
Shut down your computer, install the new drive. While the computer is off plug in the external hard drive that you have your time machine back up on. Hold Option key while the computer turnes on, let go of the option key once you get a grey screen. Shortly after you'll see a list of bootable drives, select the one that has your time machine back up on it and boot into that drive.
From there go into disk utility, format your new drive too, osx extended journaled ( I think, double check that, its been awhile since ive had to do this), hit format
Exit disk utility and then you can use time machine to copy all your exisit data to the new hhd and then your pretty much done.
There is also a program called Carbon Cloner that will do esentially the same thing however I've never uesed it.

Using Macbookpro with Aperture photos on external hard drive

I have now just about filled up my macbook pro. So I am now moving my pictures folder to an external drive. I have never done this before but it looks straight forward. After the transfer I just restart aperature and help it find the library.
But here is the question. I would like to bring my laptop on trips, take pictures, manipulate them in aperture. Then when I get home I would like to put those photos into the external drive.
I am confused about how to do that?

Bob,
I am currently using MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz with 4 GB DDR2.
Since day one I have used an external portable hard drive that has all images stored on it.
No images are stored on the MacBook.
Currently I am using a portable LaCie 250 GB running with Firewire 800.
Nearly 10,000 images at the present time.
Use a USB 500 GB portable external hard drive for the Vault (backup).
Have had no problems working this way.
I am looking to purchase a larger portable LaCie (500 GB) soon.
Stu

Using iphoto with iphoto library on external hard drive

My Imac is running snow leopard with ilife '11. I have imported way too many photos into Iphoto which is really slowing it down. I'd like to put all of my photos on an external hard drive and use that as my iphoto library--which should be possible, as I gather from reading various other related posts. Another reason to put it on an external drive is so that I can use my new macbook air to edit/organize while on the go.
1. How do I set up my Iphoto library on an external hard drive?
2. How do I make sure that all future photos go to the library on that external hard drive?
3. How do I run Iphoto with the library on an external hard drive?
THANK YOU for your help!

Hello. I just transferred my iPhoto library to a Western Digital My Book for Mac external hard drive. Do you know if I needed to format this drive even though it says it's for Mac. I did not format it and there were not any instructions with the drive that said I needed to do it. The transfer seems to have worked ok but my backups from Time Machine onto Time Capsule are inconsistent. I already posed a question regarding this problem but I noticed this message regarding formating the external disk and I wonder if that is causing the problem. Thanks.

Time Machine Backups.backupdb with "Lacie Rugged 500GB External Hard Drive"

So I bought a Macbook Pro Yesterday. I have a black Macbook from a few years ago and wanted to transfer my Hard Drive onto the new Macbook Pro. I have an external hard drive called "Lacie", made by rugged/neil poulton with 500GB of space. So yesterday I plugged it into my old Macbook and used time machine to store all of my data on the external hard drive. After it was done I plugged the external hard drive into my new Macbook. I ran Time machine and it took about an hour. Then I clicked on my "LACIE" hard drive icon on my desktop, and dragged the folder "Backups.backupdb" into my Hard Drive on my new laptop. Then a Copy window popped up and said "preparing to copy to Macintosh HD". After about 5-10 minutes the Copy Window displayed "Copying 489,020 items to Macintosh HD, Zero KB of 206.96 GB- Estimating time remaining..." I've left this window open for the past 2-3 hours and nothing has happened. It's still remaining at "Zero KB of 206.96 GB-Estimating time remaining...". Does anyone know how I can fix this problem? Did I skip a step? I feel like after 3 hours it would have at least transferred something or changed somehow. Should I rerun Time Machine?
Thanks a lot.
-Luke

jpdemers wrote:
Copying a Time Machine archive from one hard drive to another is a very slow process, especially over a USB connection. You're talking about almost half a million separate files, and the drive not only has to write them all, it has to create a directory that lists and locates all of them. I'm not sure why the Finder's "Copy" window sticks at zero KB., but if you're patient (we're talking 15 hours or thereabouts, depending on the performance of the drive), it will all get transferred eventually. You can see the dated folders popping up on the target disk, if you check on it from time to time.
I've done it for archiving purposes, prior to getting Firewire drives, but this is entirely the wrong way to transfer files to a new system. (For one thing, you're copying thousands of system files that aren't relevant to the new Mac, and thousands more that already exist.) Why do things the hard way, or the wrong way, when Setup Assistant was created for this specific task?
Amen.

Help with iTunes library on external hard drive

Hi!
I have a new computer and I don't want to put anything in it but the programs I need. When it comes to movies, music, etc. I have an external hard drive.
Now, I want my iTunes to read the music from that hard drive, and, when I download something (more music, podcasts, apps, etc.) I'd like them to go straight to the folder "iTunes" that I created in that hard drive.
I had a look at a few pages and people where only talking about creating back-ups, but I don't need that, because I have a second HD that I'll use for that.
Someone told me to do this:
Go to the File Menu, then choose Add Folder to Library. Then navigate to your external drive and folder where your music is to add it. Then all you have to do is download your new stuff to that folder.
I did that and the podcasts I had in the external HD showed up there, but when I downloaded a new one, it downloaded onto my computer. What I want to do is have my iTunes library on an external HD and when I download from iTunes I want it to go straight to that external HD so I don't clog up my computer.
I have iTunes 10.6. something =)
Thank youuuuu very much!!!! =)

As long as you don't have an existing library that is synced with a device or holds oodles of carefully crafted playlists, ratings etc. then...
Hold down shift as you start iTunes. You should get an option to choose or create a library. Click create, browse to root of the external drive and click save so that your library is say X:\iTunes where X: is the letter of your external drive. All new content downloaded to the library will stay on the external drive.
See this user tip for a backup strategy.
tt2

Help With Airport Extreme and External Hard Drive

I just purchased the Airport Extreme and I couldn't have been happier. I have attached my western digital external hard drive, but I have run into a slight problem/dilemma which I'm hoping someone who is apple savvy can help me out.
I live in a house with a couple of other guys and so I put all of my movies and media onto the hard drive so we can stream it throughout the house, but how do I make sure that someone won't accidently delete the files (The copies on the hard drive are the only ones I have)? I have tried to right click "get info" and change the sharing & permissions properties on the folders that I don't want deleted, but it doesn't save the changes or even allow me to select another option other than Read & Write. I formated the hard drive with the disk utility before I connected it to the AirPort so I know that it has nothing to do with the format of the drive. I also tried to create different user accounts for each roomate so that they could view the files (Read Only) but I get an error message explaining that if I continue, the contents of the hard drive will not be accessible. I'm sure its something simple but I'm obviously missing it.
Thanks!

Airport Utility under Disks/File Sharing has guest access rights.

Multiple Libraries with same artists on external hard drive

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