External Hard Drive and iTunes

[ZachSlusser]

Ok so this is my first post

To start off I just recently got a black macbook and a classic 160 gb ipod. I also purchased an external hard drive. I want to keep all my music on the hard drive but i also want my itunes to recognize that it is on the hard drive for when i plug in my Ipod to update it. My question is .. How do i Do this ?

Thanks for your Help.

Zach

[EatsWithFingers]

1. Connect your external hard drive and mount it (i.e. so the drive shows up on your desktop)
2. In iTunes' preferences, under the 'general' tab on the 'advanced' pane, set the library folder to the location on your external hard disk where you want your music (you'll have to create the folder yourself first)
3. Add your music to iTunes

There are a few of points to bear in mind however:

• Your external hard drive must be mounted before you open iTunes, otherwise the library location will default to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (where ~ is your home directory). If you only want to play tracks, or sync your iPod then mounting the hard drive after opening iTunes won't be a problem - it's only an issue when you're importing new stuff.
• iTunes will store the actual library database files in ~/Music/iTunes/ unless you create a second library (by holding 'alt' down when you launch iTunes) and create it elsewhere. For example, you could create a second library on the external hard disk and ignore the default one that iTunes creates (this would then mean that iTunes would complain if the external drive wasn't mounted when you launched it, so would be useful if you're the kind of person who may forget to mount it before importing new songs).
• If you want to use your own directory structure for storing your music (i.e. not Artist/Album/Track# TrackName.FileType) then make sure that 'copy music to my library when importing' is not checked (it's on the 'general' tab of the 'advanced' pane in iTunes' preferences). Then, after you'd filed and named the track to your liking, just drag it into iTunes (this works for entire directories as well).

Hope this all makes sense, and good luck.


EDIT:

And just to confuse you a little more, changing the location of your music library will not cause iTunes to forget where your existing music files are stored. They will remain where they are - it's only subsequently imported tracks that will be stored in the new location. This is handy if you want some tracks on the external hard drive, and some on your MacBook. Furthermore, if the external drive is formatted as "Mac OS Journaled" (otherwise known as HFS+) then you can freely move the imported tracks about and iTunes will not lose them (although it stores the path to the files, they're actually found via their inode numbers - and inode numbers do not change when you change the location of a file).

[ZachSlusser]

Ok. Well then, what do I do when the music is on my iTunes on my MacBook already and needs to move to my hard drive?

[EatsWithFingers]

Check out the following article from iLounge:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/art...ew-hard-drive/

It basically states three steps:

1. Consolidate your library on your MacBook (Advanced -> Consolidate Library...). This makes sure that everything is in the folder given in the preferences as the location of your library.
2. Change the location of your library to where you want it on your external drive.
3. Consolidate your library again. This will copy all your music into the new location and update iTunes' database file accordingly.

You are then free to delete the music on your MacBook.

For more info Google is your friend.

[ZachSlusser]

Ok Man thanks you for your help

[Skybolt]

Here is what iTunes says: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301748