Anyone have their iTunes library on an external HD?

I have a 500gb external HD and want to move my iTunes library onto it – has anyone done this and what pitfalls problems did they have if any. I want to do this so I can free up my memory on the laptop so I will delete the library on that – good idea or not? Any help appreciated.

most of the people i know do

itunes has a feature built in to move the library location i think

downside is if you are going to cart it around you will end up damaging some files, keep a backup

Yeah I've seen how to set it up when I did a google search and it said back stuff up on dvd – just in case. I guess that's because of info getting lost from moving files. Grrrrr

i do this.

no probs with it although obviously you need to be plugged in to the HDD when using.

I do it for higher quality files – nothing is compressed so it takes up shite loads of memory robots.

Hiya.

I've had it on an external drive in the past… and now store it on a network storage device (NAS) where I store all my media. It's pretty straightforward to setup… but one thing you really need to watch out for is ….

The drive where the library is stored (your ext drive) needs to be mounted before you open itunes. If you start itunes and it can't see the drive, it resets your library location to default (users/music in mac, My Music folder in windows). Once you plug the drive in, it'll play the music ok, but the next time you import a CD or buy something of itunes etc, it'll store it in the default location and not your ext drive… so if you're not careful, you can end up with your collection all over the place and have to do big sort outs… I've been there, not fun.

If you need any help – feel free to drop me and email..

P.S – did you post off my ipod touch yet 🙂

I do but use MediaMonkey – for a large collection of audio files I've found it to be more flexible than iTunes and better for organising them and so on. It depends on how you want to use it – if you want the software to eake the lead then iTunes will be better but if you want to prioritise customisation then MediaMonkey kicks its ass.

I do this, i think alot of people do due to the size of libraries….

its great, and works a treat. When you do the transfer, just be methodical and create a proper directory for your music, as if you dont then itunes takes a strop.

Dont forget to copy the itunes library.itl and itunes music library.xml files over..

If you structure it like this it works:

have a 'music' folder. inside this a 'itunes music' folder – where you put all your music…and have the two files previously mentioned put seperately into the 'music' folder, so not in the same folder..

Stoo – it's going tomorrow as I've only just had cleared payment from PayPal! Them and eBay are really peeing me off lately with their charges and bloody late transfers but sometimes you just get stuck with them.

Thanks for help and I'd got the gist of making sure your HD is attached BEFORE adding any further files so at the mo it's looking ok.