After a little bit of advice from the massive on this.
Just purchased a nifty little HP laptop for work on the move – dirt cheap so comes with bugger all internal memory (32GB – most of which has been swallowed to run Windows).
Trying at the moment to install a copy of my desktop’s iTunes onto an external drive which the laptop will automatically “see” when connected via the USB. It’s not having it.
Being a complete technophobe – this is causing me to wail and gnash teeth extensively. Any ideas?
The iTunes and Apple forums are worse than useless.
Ta muchly
Should be fairly straightforward….
– Copy your iTunes Media folder from your desktop to the external drive
– in iTunes preferences – choose advanced – there should be a box for iTunes Media folder location.
– with external hard drive attached, point to the folder you have copied.
– media should now appear in iTunes.
One thing to note is that if you fire up iTunes without the external USB drive connected it will default back to the standard internal drive location
also try here……
http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/move-your-itunes-library-3536383/
Thanks Chris – I’ve been trying to drag across the folder – I’ll give this a spin.
Much appreciated.
also have a look here…..
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/
You’ll need to have the software installed on your internal drive but you can access the iTunes library externally.
This should help: http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/do-more/how-to-move-your-itunes-library-to-an-external-drive-master-dm/
That looks quite easy … But would seem to imply you dont actually have to copy the library to start with. Am I missing something? I tend to need these things spelling out to me in vairy simple terms.
Yup, I did it on a seagate, but it has to exist as an icon on the main hard drive, even if all the content is remote. Works better with Media Monkey!!
On my iTunes, under “Advanced” preferences, as Chrisf has said, I have changed the location of the iTunes media folder to my external hard drive.
Unfortunately when I first did this, not all of the playcounts were copied across…but this is a moot point if the filing system remains similar – finding the files is what is important!
– One thing to note however, is that from time to time the address of the external hard drive (drive letter) sometimes changes if other devices have been attached to the computer first. (My iTunes looks for files on drive G) – it is therefore useful to have an idea of how to change drive letter in future, so that iTunes will be able to find files from the desired location.
Hope that makes sense 🙂
I think that’s because the playcounts are held in the library file (which is a XML file) and not the individual MP3 file*. When you point your new machine at the external drive, all it’s seeing is a bunch of MP3 files and builds a new library XML file accordingly.
*Obviously you wouldn’t want to add the data to the MP3 file as it would then be updated each time you played it.
@badger_king : On Windows you can force the OS to keep the same drive letter whenever it is attached. Start menu -> right click Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management -> right click the drive -> Change letter and path.
Thanks everyone.
Will try again at the weekend with a fresh head
Moving my iTunes library between machines was a complete nightmare and in the end I gave up, deleted everything, reinstalled iTunes and populated it from the iPod using a 3rd party utility. It is way too complicated – it would be so much easier if you could just stick the files in a directory and point at it but that isn’t the Apple way.
I’ve moved things around several times on both my Macs including moving from internal to external and back again and splitting the library between drives. All the playlists etc were retained. I haven’t done it for a while but the key was to identify the XML file containing the library details and hand editing it (using a few find and replaces) to point at the new location. As long as the library file has all the right paths in it before you fire up iTunes for the first time, it works like a dream. There used to be at least one file you need to delete so that the library gets rebuilt from the details in the XML file. I don’t know whether they’ve made it any more complicated in the past few years or not.
That sounds (possibly) doable – but does anyone know if I did this – moving my iTunes library to a separate hard drive to free up space on my iMac – would it cause problems when I listen to my iTunes library through my Apple TV conected to TV/hi fi in another room?
Should be no problem with the streaming to the Apple TV – as long as the separate hard drive is connected. The Apple TV simply connects to iTunes and as long as that can find the content then all is well.
I have my iTunes library stored on a network drive and successfully stream to two Apple TVs via iTunes on my iMac
Thanks Chrisf – that makes me feel unusually optimistic … I’ve been thinking of doing this for months and may actually now get round to it