I've just ordered a new iMac and it will probably come with Catalina. However, I only got a 512GB SSD. I keep my music collection on an external hard drive because it takes up so much space. I have heard from my friends that the Music app only allows you to maintain files that are on the boot up drive, I am not sure how true this is though.
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Music app and external hard drives
- Thread starter retta283
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No, I don’t believe that is true. I have all my music stored on a NAS and it seems to have imported the library fine. It could be that the library file, itself, needs to be on the main drive - I haven’t checked that? Though I know if you launch music.app while pressing the Opt key you can choose libraries that are not local, so I don’t know what the alleged issue is.
Perhaps the problem wasn't that you could not play the files, but in order to sync them with a device they had to be boot drive. This is going off of memory.
Oh, maybe. I don’t sync with devices (other than iTunes Match), so I have no idea.
Hi. I have the same situation as you (I went from a 2TB fusion drive on a late 2009 iMac to a brand new 2019 512gig SSD iMac.)
You can easily run your Music app on your new Mac with your library on an external drive. I have an 8 TB external and all my old music, about 900 gigs worth, is on there. You just need to direct your Music library to the external drive that is mounted to your Mac. You can go through the preferences in the Music app and point the library to the external drive location you want to keep the music in and you are all set. It's working fine for me so far and not even any lag from when I hit "Play" to when the music starts.
Hope this helps.