Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

SteelBlueTJ

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 2, 2012
445
67
USA
I have been using iTunes for many years. I have a late-2013 iMac with 256GB internal SSD running Sierra 10.12.4. I don't use the internal storage for iTunes media. I have an external drive setup for that. Yesterday I noticed that when I click on "About this Mac" and go to storage, my internal drive shows 412GB of red iTunes almost taking up the whole bar. Now how could this be if I set the iTunes media folder location to my external? I double checked in iTunes preferences>advanced and it still shows my external as its source. What's strange is my internal shows 412Gb used up on the bar, but still says 216.34 GB free of 249.77 GB. This makes no sense to me. Anyone have any idea what this is about? Thanks
 
Download Grand Perspective or something like it and allow it to analyze your SSD's file system. It provides infinite granularity compared with the very general summary you've seen.
 
Daisy Disk is also good for seeing drive contents, file size, etc. Used it many times to track down whats using up my drive space.
 
When you moved all your music to the external drive, did you delete the copy of it in your user/music/iTunes Media/Music folder? Are you the only user of the Mac? Someone else may have a Music library on the internal SSD.
The music may also have ended up copied to internal SSD by some unhappy accident.
In that case, you should be able to just delete it without consequence.
 
I am the only user. I've had it set up like this since day one of owning the mac. Never once had iTunes media on my internal drive. But what's weird is the internal drive only is 256GB but it says 412Gb is iTunes? How is that even possible? I went into my home folder>Music>and there is an iTunes folder, but there is no media files in there. It has a few itl playlist data files. I deleted it all and now when I launch iTunes I lost all my playlists. For some reason it almost seems like it's saving the media to my external but everything else to my internal?
 
It's normal to have an itl files in there even when your music is elsewhere.
You've got something odd going on. Are you using one of Apple's cloud music services?
I'd try actual adding a song to your SDD iTunes library. Hold down option while opening iTunes to select the SDD library, then just drag a son file onto the app.
That might clear up the problem.
But as you say, you've got more music than you have disk space, so I suspect some cloud oddity.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.