I tunes library on an external hard disk

placeholder · 14 Feb 2011 at 18:56

Hey guys, I'm after a bit of help here. Apologies if this is a stupid question.

I have an external hard disk with music and films attached to my router to be accessed by all the various devices round the house.

I have a new laptop onto which I have just downloaded iTunes. What I want to do is view all the music on the external hard disk in iTunes without actually importing it onto the laptop? I've seen guides about moving the library to an external source but I don't have it on the laptop in the first place? Any thoughts? Also the music files aren't in any great order on the Hard disk and I would really like some software to put all the albums and song titles in a logical format?

Finally I have downloaded air video for my iPhone and iPad to access the videos, is there a similar app for music?

Many thanks for any input/advice.

placeholder · 14 Feb 2011 at 19:36

Unless I'm being really thick, that's already unticked and I've got the external hard disks folder location in the "iTunes media location" box. iTunes still appears to be empty though.

placeholder · 14 Feb 2011 at 20:14

I want all the music to appear when I load up iTunes but I want to keep it stored on the external hard disk. Effectively I want the music to show up on any computer on my network but only be stored on the external disk.

placeholder · 14 Feb 2011 at 20:25

No worries, thanks anyway.

I don't want to clog up the laptop with music but I still want the functionality of iTunes displaying all the available music, cover art etc.

I just assumed it would be straight forward but maybe not!

placeholder · 14 Feb 2011 at 21:08

The laptop isnt a mac. I can see the external hard disk no problem. If I import the music into iTunes will it physically import it onto the laptop or will it just pick it up from the hard disk?

placeholder · 15 Feb 2011 at 10:21

Seems to have worked! Excellent!

I have the music backed up on a second hard disk just in case too.

Does anyone have any thoughts on clean up software for the music library and also similar apps to Air Video for music streaming to the iPad and iPhone?

Thanks again!