Moving manually managed music folder (wow) to a different hard drive

The only way I know of doing it is to change to having iTunes manage your music files, changing the location in preferences to the new drive and then choosing Consolidate Music from the Advanced menu.

You could move your top-level music folders to the external drive & then create symbolic links to redirect file-system requests to the new locations. This works fine for existing media but iTunes won't redirect files it is saving for some reason, e.g. Podcasts, TV Shows etc. would end up with the library files rather than being redirected. I've used such schemes for the last year or so as my library was getting to large to hold on the local disk. I gradually moved sections out to the external drive and placed the links as needed. While this has worked I recently bit the bullet & restructured my library so that it is now fully portable. Putting everything on the external drive, within the iTunes music folder, means that I can connect my drive to another machine & whatever drive letter gets assigned I can still work with the library. I still manaually manage the folders so that I can have full length file & folder names for example.

tt2