ITunes - storing music on external drive

BrownGirl

I'm trying to set up my iTunes so that it stores all the music files on my external hard drive, rather than automatically transferring it all to my internal drive, as the overall file size is too big to store it on the internal hard drive. I'm struggling to work out what settings I need to change within iTunes.

At the moment, I have the files on my external hard drive but when I do file>add folder to library it starts downloading the files into iTunes. I tried last night and ended up with duplicate copies of every track. I've tried googling it but most the answers seem to relate to macs and I have PC running Vista, or seem confusing and I don't want to totally mess up everything and lose all my music.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some clear instructions for what I need to do? Thanks very much

closed

Bigger internal drives don't cost too much (£30-35 for 500GB if it's sata), if you put it all on the external and it fails, you'll lose the lot. Have you got another (empty) partition on the machine, eg d drive?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

googler

BrownGirl wrote: »

I'm trying to set up my iTunes so that it stores all the music files on my external hard drive, rather than automatically transferring it all to my internal drive, as the overall file size is too big to store it on the internal hard drive. I'm struggling to work out what settings I need to change within iTunes.

At the moment, I have the files on my external hard drive but when I do file>add folder to library it starts downloading the files into iTunes.

The Add Folder dialog should add LINKS to the files in your folder, without actually adding the music files themselves into the iTunes library - you should get an entry in the library for each track in your folder. If you have duplicate tracks in the folder, you'll get duplicate entries in iTunes

It can't have duplicated all the data on your internal drive, because you said the drive was too small.

BrownGirl wrote: »

I tried last night and ended up with duplicate copies of every track. I've tried googling it but most the answers seem to relate to macs and I have PC running Vista, or seem confusing and I don't want to totally mess up everything and lose all my music.

If your music is stored as mp3s or other files outwith iTunes, you CANNOT mess that up merely by adding the folder to iTunes.

Tell us, step by step, what you've done so far. Did you copy the music to this external folder from iTunes to start with, or did you get the music into this folder by other means?

BrownGirl

Thanks for your replies. I copied the itunes music folder to an external drive and added copies of additional music (from CDs) to this. I then opened iTunes and selected the add folder option, pointing it to the folder on my external drive. It started doing something (copying things across or creating links?) and brought error message saying C drive (internal) wasn't big enough. It carried on doing something (could see the file names/numbers changing in the menu bar at the top) and then, when it had finished, everything that was already on iTunes now had a duplicate entry.

I've done various things throughout today to try and sort it and I think where I am at the moment is I have copied some of the folders back from my external drive to my C drive, in similar folder format to before. I've got a copy of all these on my external drive, plus other stuff which I've not copied onto my C drive due to size. I think I'm back in similar position where I started, but would still like, if possible, to just point iTunes at my external drive and for it not to try and copy files or put links onto C drive.

BrownGirl

closed wrote: »

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1364

Thanks Closed, that looks like what I was trying to do. I'll give it a go tomorrow.