How to Use an External Hard Drive With ITunes
Apple’s iTunes has revolutionized the way we listen to, store and buy music. Although a large music library no longer requires yards and yards of shelf space, it does require an ample amount of hard drive space. As time has passed, hard drives have become cheaper, while offering an ever-larger capacity. Many users choose to use an external hard drive to store their music libraries. The reasons include needing more space than the internal drive of their computer is able to offer, to be able to tote the external drive around for use wherever they travel, or to comply with corporate protocol and not put any personal information on a company computer.
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Instructions
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Attach the hard drive to your computer. If your computer can handle a FireWire drive, use it because it’s faster than a USB connection and will improve music play.
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Open iTunes and select "Preferences." Click on the "Advanced" tab and you will see the path to your music library. Click "Change" and navigate to the external hard drive. You can create a new folder or select an existing folder on the external hard drive.
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Add music into your library. If you have an existing music library on your internal hard drive, click the "File" menu, select "Add To Library" and select the iTunes music folder on your internal hard drive. This will copy the music into the new folder, but not delete it from your hard drive.
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Delete the music files from your internal hard drive once the files have finished transferring. Make sure you can play your music before deleting the files from your internal hard drive.
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Back up your iTunes folder on a regular basis, if you have purchased music or rare tracks that can’t be replaced easily. Don’t bother backing up the music that you have on a CD, because the CD can serve as your backup.
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Tips & Warnings
Check the capacity of your external hard drive on a regular basis to make sure you’re not pushing the envelope on storage space.
Downloading music illegally is a bad idea; not only is it punishable by law, you may be exposing your PC to crippling viruses.
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Comments
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Wow, thanks so much for that last step of Restarting iTunes while holding the shift key. It finaly worked after moving everything to external HD. Why did everyone omit that vital step? Duh! for lack of a better word. Thanks again
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Mar 05, 2011
I feel your pain, Alimat8! What was left off these instructions is that, after copying your iTunes file to your external hard drive, you need to point the program there Restart iTunes, while holding the shift key down the entire time. You will get a dialog box which asks you to "Choose iTunes Library". Click on "Choose Library". Select the "iTunes Library" file from its new location on your external hard drive. You should be good to go. It only took me several hours of piecing together instructions from different sources to figure this out. -
Samuel Bart Bell
Feb 09, 2011
If you've already selected the folder on your external HD in the 'advanced' pane in itunes, go back to the main itunes window and drop down the 'file' menu. Click on 'add to library'. Select the same folder on your external HD as you did in the advanced preferences pane and voila! It all fills in.
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alimat84
Feb 06, 2011
So I tried this, but my music isn't showing up in itunes. It is on the hard drive and I can play it from there, but for some reason its not showing up in itunes. I even imported new music and it wrote to the external hard drive too like it was supposed to. Help please?
