I tunes library on an external hard disk

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Soldato
Joined
14 Jul 2007
Posts
3,443
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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!
 
I assume the hard drive is a network hard drive. If so then make sure to mount the hard drive onto the Mac so it can be seen in OS X as another drive. Then simply drag and drop the music into iTunes. It should then import the music to iTunes without copying onto the laptop.

You can use iTunes to sort, label,etc the music. This is how I did it before installing a larger hard drive.
 
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?
 
pick it up from hard disk....also have an xp laptop doing this...just did not allow itunes to organise files
 
Hold Alt when you click to open iTunes. iTunes will ask you where the library file is, so point it at the directory on the external disk.

Do this for all your laptops etc. Bare in mind you can only use 1 machine at a time for this method though.

Alternatively, untick "Copy music to library when adding". After you've done that, drag all the music files (dragging folders will work) from the external drive in to iTunes. This will create links to the music on the laptop, but it will appear to add the tracks to iTunes.

Bare in mind, if the drive dies you're up cack alley and the music will not be accessible.

Hope this helps :)
 
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!
 
There's a lot of over-complication gone on here, all you need to do is tell iTunes where to look for the library.

Open iTunes > edit > preferences > advanced
Then enter into the top box where the library is that you want to use.
 
Disco Boy said:
There's a lot of over-complication gone on here, all you need to do is tell iTunes where to look for the library.

Open iTunes > edit > preferences > advanced
Then enter into the top box where the library is that you want to use.
Click to expand...

That will only work for 1 machine at a time.
 
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