iTunes Question

[Jazzjet]

I'm hoping can answer this ( hopefully ) simple question.

All my digital music collection is on my desktop computer ( an iMac G5 ) and now I want to listen to this music on my laptop. So I copied my whole iTunes library to an external drive and connected the drive to my laptop ( a Macbook ). On my laptop I reset the location of my iTunes music folder to the location on the external drive and ensured all the correct boxes were ticked. I would have expected to now see my iTunes library on iTunes on my laptop but I can see nothing! Am I missing something? I wouldn't have thought I would have to consolidate my library as I have no music on my laptop version of iTunes. I don't really want to copy the music to my laptops internal drive because of the size of the library ( 38Gb ). Any ideas?

[blajay]

My external hard drive is sometimes finicky. I have to keep plugging it into the USB port on my laptop until it shows up. Make sure on My Computer on your laptop that it has shown up, then you may want to try playing a song by going into its folder on your external hard drive just to make sure it does work. If that works, then you should be able to just "add folder" from your ITunes too. If not, I'm not sure why it wouldn't work.

[John L]

One easy solution is to go to "add folder to iTunes library" from the file menu, and then select the iTunes Music folder in your external drive.

A faster, yet somewhat more complicated solution is to copy latest "iTunes Library" file to the external drive along with the MP3s. When you load iTunes, there is a key you can push (I forget right now which one. Somebody else can probably help out here) that allows you to choose a library file manually. One you do it once, you won't have to do it again.

Edited September 15, 2008 by John L

[Jazzjet]

My external hard drive is sometimes finicky. I have to keep plugging it into the USB port on my laptop until it shows up. Make sure on My Computer on your laptop that it has shown up, then you may want to try playing a song by going into its folder on your external hard drive just to make sure it does work. If that works, then you should be able to just "add folder" from your ITunes too. If not, I'm not sure why it wouldn't work.

Thanks for the reply. The external drive shows up fine and I can select an individual music file and play it in iTunes OK. But I want to keep the files on my external drive (rather than add them onto my laptop) and play them from there. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm doing some more research so lets see what turns up. Any more help in the meantime much appreciated.

[John L]

If you have gone to the advanced menu and selected the external drive as your default iTunes drive, when you add folders to your library from the external drive, iTunes will not copy MP3 files to your laptop's hard drive. It will leave them in the external drive and recognize them there.

Edited September 15, 2008 by John L

[Jazzjet]

If you have gone to the advanced menu and selected the external drive as your default iTunes drive, when you add folders to your library from the external drive, iTunes will not copy MP3 files to your laptop's hard drive. It will leave them in the external drive and recognize them there.

Thanks John L and zanones for your help. The confusion on my part was between the iTunes Music folder and the iTunes Library file. I thought just setting the Music folder as the destination would be enough. Clearly not. The solution is to press the option key while opening iTunes ( on a Mac ). and choosing library, ie choosing the iTunes Library file. It's a bit annoying when it tries to load up all the artwork thumbnails but hopefully that's a one-off.

Thanks again.

[blajay]

Thanks John L and zanones for your help. The confusion on my part was between the iTunes Music folder and the iTunes Library file. I thought just setting the Music folder as the destination would be enough. Clearly not. The solution is to press the option key while opening iTunes ( on a Mac ). and choosing library, ie choosing the iTunes Library file. It's a bit annoying when it tries to load up all the artwork thumbnails but hopefully that's a one-off.

Thanks again.

No problem. Yeah, when my iTunes tries to upload all the artwork, I just close it by hitting the "x" next to where it says it is uploading it to stop it from doing so and taking forever.