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Using Itunes on a portable hard drive

ok itunes is REALLY annoying me now so many issues with itunes that need resolving its totally unacceptable!

heres the situation.
ive got my ipod with all my music i want on it then i get some more songs/ albums i want to add to the ipod.
so i open itunes and add the songs as i usually would (i connect my hard drive, drag and drop the tunes from my computer to the hard drive to reduce my space on my laptop hard drive, then i drag those files onto itunes and let it add the songs into library)
so this goes fine. then i look at the rest of the songs and i cant play them because itunes cannot find them.
as im studying music i have a huge amount of music from college and my parents music and my music which adds up to just under 20gig of music. i do not want to add 20gig of music to itunes library every time i want to add 1 or 2 songs i hav to listen to for my music course or 1 album.

The itunes library is saved onto my EXTERNAL harddrive like my music so the music is ALWAYS in the same folder, eg. F:/Music/...
im the only one who uses itunes in my family but not the only person who uses the EXT hard drive.
how can i make itunes find these files and remember the location of the files?

just to iterate my music and library are on the EXT hard drive but itunes the program is on my computer..

Windows XP

Posted on Jul 21, 2009 7:38 AM

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4 replies

Jul 23, 2009 3:33 AM in response to penfold1992

i cant its my brothers and he needs 2 use it but he doesnt hav iTunes and wont get it..
is there anyway i can recover it? i mean if i restart with the cable in and boot the library (which is on the hard drive)
i dont understand the files that the library looks through are in the same place relative to where it was last time. surely the library works like.

FILE FOUND IN LOCATION: xxx

because when you move the file in relation to the library the location can still be found.

i dont wna upload a shed load of music again it will just take forever to sort out what i need and dont from my collection. especially if i hav to do this EVERYTIME i just wna load a new album or song.

this harddrive aint big enough for the music collection and nor is my brothers so the hard drive will be moving..

Jul 23, 2009 5:20 PM in response to penfold1992

I think this will come down to settings in iTunes. You probably need to have iTunes set to not manage library. This lets you have the files wherever you like. A caution though is that the external drive needs to always get the same drive letter as this is part of what is stored in iTunes library.

You may want to consider running iPod in manual manage mode. When run this way the media files don't have to remain on computer drive to retain on iPod. The files do need to be available and in library to add to iPod though.

Using Itunes on a portable hard drive

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