Moving your iTunes Library to an external hard drive

10 05 2008

Here is a simple guide on how to move iTunes to an external hard drive. First open iTunes and go to preferences. Then go to Advanced and write down where your iTunes folder currently resides. Next, change where your iTunes folder location is to your external hard drive. Then, under the Advanced menu at the top of your toolbar, select Consolidate Library. This copies everything to your external hard drive. Now go back to where your iTunes folder was located (you should have written this down) and delete the iTunes Music folder, (nothing else!). Now you should have all of your ratings, play count, and other metadata still intact when you moved to the external hard drive. Was this guide helpful with all of the information you needed? Post your thoughts in the comments!

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Date : 10 May 2008
Categories : Mac, Software, Windows

12 responses to “Moving your iTunes Library to an external hard drive”

11 05 2008: Anonymous (07:58:27) :

great tutorial! i was able to follow every instruction perfectly and now my itunes library is on my external hard drive. Thank you again
11 05 2008: ageekspot (16:48:51) :

Great tip! Everyone should back-up their tunes!
12 05 2008: arleen (05:23:54) :

how about just dragging and dropping your itunes music folder from your internal hdd to your external hdd. then if you need you can re-add all music to itunes if you have a hdd failure.
12 05 2008: soccerislife8 (06:12:47) :

for backing up purposes, yes that would work, but if you wanted to move your itunes library and still use it in itunes, then you would have to follow this tutorial. By drag and dropping it, you also lose all of the itunes specific metadata like last played, play count, and ratings.
13 05 2008: Justin Gawronski (16:34:03) :

bleh I did this awhile ago and just recently my external harddrive failed…

Yea -_-

yourockeepliving.wordpress.com
13 05 2008: soccerislife8 (16:39:36) :

oh I’m sorry to hear about your hard drive. Did you have your music and documents backed up? also, if you want your website to be publicized on my site, post it here.

http://soccerislife8.wordpress.com/user-submitted/post-your-website-for-increased-traffic/
15 05 2008: Anonymous (06:57:03) :

Thanks for the info
15 05 2008: Anonymous (16:11:09) :

u really help
15 05 2008: soccerislife8 (21:14:20) :

Thank you for all of your comments!
17 05 2008: Moving your iTunes Library to an external hard drive « Tech Update (07:08:35) :

[…] your iTunes folder currently resides. Sorry but the rest of the article has moved to a location http://techupdate.blogvis.com/2008/05/10/moving-your-itunes-library-to-an-external-hard-drive/ Sorry for the inconvenience. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)In which I prove that […]
17 05 2008: Anonymous (07:52:09) :

sorry to hear that you moved. but i love the look of your new site.
1 09 2008: Rob Payne (10:07:44) :

Is it possible to copy iTunes library so it runs on two PCs as I have just purchased an iTouch and I wanted to transfer my music and playlists onto it.