Music from one hd to another

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tangerine dream

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At the present moment I have 75,000 songs on itunes. Can be found currently under edit>preferences>advanced in the box I have the location as K:/Music Files.
My new hard drive has a folder also called Music Files (this has almost 90,000 songs). (F:/Music Files).
If i was to turn off my K external hard drive and then switch on my F external hard drive and then under edit>preferences>advanced in the box change the location to F:/Music Files would all the music automatically be captured on itunes?

....or would I need to go to file>add folder to library and direct it to F:/Music Files and then wait hours for the library to fill up.
If I am talking rubbish please direct me to te easiest way please.
I appreciate any answers I may get.
 

cjmnews

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It is unclear what you are trying to do.

Does the F drive have all the same music as K plus more? So just make iTunes use F in place of K?
Does the F drive have a different set of music than K? So you want to merge K into F and use F?
Is the F drive in iTunes already?
I am assuming the K drive is in iTunes.

What are your iTunes options for the library management?
Edit->Preferences, Advanced
Keep iTunes Media folder organized (checked or unchecked)
Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library (checked or unchecked)

Typical movement of iTunes libraries is through the Consolidate command. I don't want to get into that until I understand what the goal is.
 

tangerine dream

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Thanks for the reply.

The F drive has a combination of some of the music on the K drive and lots more. The reason for the change is that the K drive is now too small. What I want to do is get my itunes library to only have the music from the F drive.

Keep iTunes Media folder organized (checked)
Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library (checked)

I hope that helps
 

cjmnews

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Of course the most complicated procedure.

Do you know if the music that is duplicated on the F drive has exactly the same tags as the K drive version? It would make finding duplicates easier.

We are following the Apple pages:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204668
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH20392

Anyway, what you are going to want to do is:
- move K to F
- import the files in F to the iTunes library on F
- delete the duplicates

First off create a new iTunes folder on the F drive. You can't use the F:\Music Files folder as it already has music in it. If you want to have the iTunes folder called Music Files you'll need to rename the current folder to just Music or something, then create an empty folder called Music Files.

Have the K drive up and connected, open iTunes.
Edit->Preferences, Advanced. Click on the Change button next to the iTunes Media folder location box.
Locate the folder F:\Music Files (if that is the empty folder name) and click Select Folder.
Click on File->Library->Organize Library.
Put a check mark next to Consolidate Files and then click OK.
Wait until 75000 files are copied from the K drive to the F drive. Go see a movie, two maybe.

Play a few tracks in iTunes to make sure it got them all.
Right click a track, choose Get Info and check the File tab to verify it is on the F drive.

Now you should be able to eject the K drive. Check a few more songs to make sure they are not missing.

Time to merge the 90,000 files into the 75,000 files.

Click File->Add Folder to library
Choose the Music folder where the 90,000 files are and click Select Folder.
Wait for 90,000 files to be copied from the original location to the iTunes folder. Hopefully this will be faster than copying from drive to drive. Maybe 1 movie?

Play a few tracks in iTunes to make sure it got them all.
Check the count in the Music section to see if you are over 160,000 tracks.

Now we need to delete the duplicates.

In iTunes, click on View->Show Duplicates.
Here you may need to be careful as some duplicates are not actually duplicates.
I find this to be true with Classical music in particular.

I use Song view (upper right corner to change)
If you sort by Album Artist, then it should put songs that it thinks are duplicates next to each other.
Add the Date Added column to see which version is which.
The Date Added rows with today's date are the duplicates from the F drive copy you just imported. I would delete these as they should have no play count data associated with them.

When deleting the files, be sure to send them to the recycle bin too.

Now you should be able to delete the original F drive copy (Not the F:\Music Files copy) and the K drive copy of the files.

That's basically it.
 

tangerine dream

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Thanks for the comprehensive guidelines. Starting what I think will be a long process today
 
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