Father Jack Hackett

iTunes getting big, what with the Wife having a 60GB iPod now as well, so I bought a FireWire hard drive (250GB LaCie) to keep it all on. What do I need to transfer over - is it just the folder iTunes Music? I think I need to leave the other stuff in the iTunes folder on the main HD, is that right?

Mac OSX 10.3.

Cheers!

Jack

class_A

Yup You can move the iTunes Music directory across to the FW HD and then create an alias to the new location and put that in place of the one you just moved. Then iTunes won't know any different and you'll still be able to browse your library without the external drive connected.

Father Jack Hackett

Thanks class_A. Dumb n00b question : if I can browse the library without the external drive connected, does that mean the music files are also on my internal drive (which would kind of defeat the purpose)?

Cheers!

class_A

No. IIRC, iTunes uses the iTunes Music Library file to store details about everything in your collection including play count, rating, cached ID3 tag information etc. The only thing it doesn't retain is album art.

If you try and play a track without the drive connected, it will throw an error dialog and will place a little exclaimation mark against that particular track but that will be removed next time you successfully play the item.

Father Jack Hackett

OK, thanks again. So I don't really need the alias at all - I could just point iTunes to the new location?

class_A

Yes if you wanted but I don't know how gracefully iTunes handles trying to open a library that doesn't exist, ie. you open iTunes with the drive unmounted or disconnected.

Markus

From memory, if iTunes cannot locate the libary at the specified location, it'll jump back to try and use the default location of ~/Music/iTunes/