External Hard Drive

[Quick_Chic]

Hi All

I've read through various threads but couldnt find a direct answer to my query! We have a PC where we store all our itunes music. Basically the hard drive is almost full and causing issues to use the PC for basic things like internet etc. So we were considering moving all our music off the PC hard drive into an external hard drive...will this work and will itunes work OK with the music library's being stored in an external drive?

We could put a 2nd hard drive into the PC, but we plan to travel next year with a laptop, and want to keep that free of music, so the plan is to take our music with us on an external drive...again is this feasible?

Thanks in advance!!!

[Blue_Dawg]

Having your library on an external drive works just fine. Copy your entire iTunes folder over to the external drive. Once that is done select all of the songs in iTunes and delete them. Go to file and ad folder to library and select the folder on the external. Once all the music is added you are set and good to go.

[S2_Mac]

Er, maybe not totally good to go....depending on the state of a preference setting, you may find these tunes copied back from the external drive onto the internal drive; p'bly not what you want.

Yes, copy your entire "iTunes" folder onto the external drive. Next, fire up iTunes and open the Preferences window; click the Advanced tab, then click the General button; and then change the "iTunes Music folder location" pref to the "iTunes Music" folder on the external drive. (This tells iTunes to put new music on the external drive, and not onto the internal drive.) Save the pref change and quit iTunes.

Now you can trash the "iTunes Music" folder from the internal drive. (Don't trash the "iTunes" folder, just the "iTunes Music" folder inside it.) Empty the trash. At this point, it's possible that iTunes is smart enough to save you some work....go ahead and fire up iTunes, and try to play a song. If it plays, then you don't have to do anything more. If it doesn't play (all you get is a "!" next to the track's listing), then you'll have to drop the "iTunes Music" folder onto the iTunes window (or use File->Add folder to library, as described above by BD) to make iTunes "see" the files on the external. (And that's why you changed the iTunes Music folder location pref at the start of all this -- if that pref had remained set to the internal drive, and if the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" pref was also set, then all those files on the external drive would have been copied over to the internal drive's iTunes Music folder...oof!)