Keeping my Music on External Drive

[rodders128]

Hi, In advance Thanks.

I am moving from Windows to MAC.

I about 850GB of music I have transferred onto an External USB Drive from my Mr Gates PC.

Plugged it into the MAC, Gone to iTunes and added that folder music to my iTunes.

I have just found out that my Internal HDD on the mac now has had all the music transferred to it which I didn't want.

So my nice shiny new iMac now has around 30GB free space.

2 Questions, 1, Why has it transferred itself to the internal drive and 2, Can I just keep it on the external

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

It has transfered itself because that is the default action for iTunes. You can turn it off under Preferences -> Advanced. Turning it off should make iTunes behave as you seem to want it.

I suggest you turn it off and quit iTunes, and then delete the ~/Music/iTunes/ folder and start from fresh.

 

[rodders128]

Ah, Cool so I un tick the 'Copy files to iTunes Media'. Remove everything from iTunes, Re Add it from External Drive

Do you know If you would need to re do all my Playlists again, Does the play lists look at the file locations or File name etc

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Exactly.

If you just delete the files from within iTunes, then you don't have to redo all Smart playlists. Manual playlists has to be redone.

 

[rodders128]

 

[Paco II]

Do you want the external hard drive to be the single source of truth? If yes, you'll want to update the iTunes media folder location to your hard drive, then re-check the option to copy files when adding