Firstly I know other music libraries are available…….

Our main music library is on a laptop which is running out of hard drive space
The library has been added to over more than 10 years and may be a bit of a dogs breakfast – although Ive just paid for one of those todying up app things which seems to have smartened it up a bit and sorted out some listing glitches

For video streaming we have a desktop Mac, its all networked via home sharing and to my amazement works pretty well around the house

What I would like to do is transfer my music library to the desktop to free up space on the laptop
Whats the most efficient way of doing this?
Ive started it via home sharing but there is already 60% of the music library on the desktop and it looks like it wants to duplicate these tracks when I try
Alternatively I could just delete the library on the desktop and populate it either via my home network or an external HD – but if I do this I need to be careful with my video content as this is purely on the desktop

Thanks – I hope Ive made myself clear, but as Im still a bit hazy myself Im not sure if I have
Oh and whats the Apple music cloud thing about, it looks interesting but would it help me in particular and is it worth looking at over and above the Google thing, thinking Im in the Apple family so the Google thing may be more painful (although all of our phones are Android syncing from the laptop)

Cheers

You can just manually move the whole iTunes library via an external HDD to your new computer then tell iTunes where the new location is under Preferences, then consolidate the library. This has worked many times for me in the past, though one time I did lose all my playlists, so not quite sure what I did differently on that occasion. Google it and you’ll find loads of instructions.

I use a MacBook Air which has too little memory to act as a home PC, but I just transferred all of our iTunes in to an external drive and it works absolutely fine.

If playlists and the like are important copy the whole iTunes folder from wherever it is kept on the laptop to the desktop machine. Tell iTunes where this is on the desktop like wobbliscott says above and then consolidate the music from the desktop (original library) into the new library.
If you are using a Mac once you copy the library from the laptop fire up iTunes with the option (alt) key held down. Select the copied library from the dialogue that appears and then consolidate.