External Harddrive vs. itunes 4

[estavans_lackey]

So, I just transfered all of my music (10 GB) to an 80 GB external firewire and cannot access any of the music unless I go SONG BY SONG and change the setting.

I've went into the itunes music folder location to change ...well, it's location. That doesn't work. There has to be an easier way to do this.

If anyone could provide any help, that would be awesome.

 

[Arden]

This will reset all your EQ settings, but delete all the songs from your library (do NOT delete the actual files) and add them back again. Yes, it would be nice if iTunes would find a file that had been moved to a different disk, but that's life. Either you can relocate each one individually, or you can remake your playlists.

 

[estavans_lackey]

Add them back how? One by one or is there an easy way to insert all of them at once? Excuse my ignorance. I'm just a beginner.

 

[Pengu]

Just drag the folder with your music in it, onto the library icon in the itunes playlist pane.

 

[willythekidkatt]

Pengu, I tried your trick, but it didn't work! Itunes tried to copy the actual mp3:s to the internal harddrive. I want to keep the songs on the external harddrive, but I want Itunes to automatically locate them. Any ideas?

 

[Convert]

Preferences>Advanced>Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library".

 

[Mikuro]

That method will erase all your ratings, play count data, and playlists! Aaaah! But I guess there's no getting around that now, since you already deleted them from your library.

For future reference, there is a way to get this done. It's tricky, but it works.
1. Quit iTunes before messing with any of your files.
2. Move your music folder to the new drive.
3. Delete them from your old drive.
4. Create a symbolic link (not an alias; see below for details) of the folder on your new drive, and put it in the same location it used to be on the old drive. Be sure it has the same name as the actual folder, e.g., "iTunes Music", not "iTunes Music symlink"
5. Relaunch iTunes, and play your songs. It should just work.

If you don't know how to create a symbolic link, download and install SymbolicLinker. It's a CMM (Contextual Menu Module) that lets you create symbolic links of any item by control-clicking on it in the Finder.


The little gotcha with this method is that it requires that you maintain the exact same directory structure. In your case, that won't be a problem, since you're copying the folder straight from disk A to disk B. BUT, be careful not to rename any of your files UNTIL you play them at least once in iTunes. Until you do, iTunes will be able to find them ONLY by their file names and paths. After you play them once in iTunes, you can do whatever you want.