Transferring iTunes to external hard drive

[Phil Sloss]

I have a lap top with about 20G of memory. I recently filled all of that up with my music so I bought an external hard drive and transferred all of the music files from the c drive onto the external drive.

I’ve reconfigured iTunes via Edit, Preferences, Advanced so that the iTunes location folder is now the external drive and it seems to be working as when I upload new CDs they are stored only on the external drive and not on the c drive.

However there is still one small problem. I obviously want to free up the space on my C drive so I tried deleting a couple of the old files, while ensuring that they are definitely saved on the external drive. When I try to play these tracks in iTunes though it says that it cannot find the location of the file and asks if I would like to find it. When I search for the track I can find it in the external drive and from then on, it works fine.

This is quite a lengthy process for just one track - how can I make my iTunes look for all of the files in the new external drive as I don’t fancy doing this for 5000 individual songs?

[honeybee1236]

See the article on moving your iTunes to a new HD in iPod 101/201.

http://www.ipodlounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/

[bighairy]

I have never seen anyone else mention this but I find it very useful.

I have put all my iTunes songs on their own virtual drive using the old DOS Subst command. This lets you create a new drive letter pointing at any subdirectory.

This means that iTunes thinks my music is on my M: drive and Photoshop Elements thinks my pictures are on my P: drive.

I have a little dos batch file that runs at startup that looks like this:

subst M: c:\allmusic\itunes\anywhere
subst P: c:\pictures\anywhere

At any time I can move all my music and I just have to change the subst command.

You might want to consider this if you are moving all your music to an external disk as you can set M: aside (or any other letter) and point it at the external drive.