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User profile for user: jeffduneman
jeffduneman Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Itunes Library to new Imac?

I have my old itunes library on an external drive and wish to keep it there. So how do I get my "new" imac (it's a 2017 model) to play the music without transferring my whole library to the imac's hard drive? I have 1,000s of songs and so it would take up my whole memory. On my old macbook I could plug in the external drive to play music and it would read (most of) the songs from the external drive. I have already put the imac's media folder location as the external hard drive but the songs do not appear in its itunes. If I "import library" it seems all the songs will go to the imac's hard drive, which, again, I cannot do because of space. Help!

Posted on Feb 7, 2021 11:01 AM

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User profile for user: turingtest2
turingtest2
User level: Level 10
273,033 points

Posted on Feb 9, 2021 11:26 AM

If you gather the whole library into a portable shape on the external drive then you can connect to and use it on that external drive with a different computer. When moving to Music from iTunes your old iTunes library needs to be converted to the new Music format. You can choose to save the converted library on the external drive along with the media. The converted library will use the same media folder as before by default. You can do something similar with the TV app. You don't get any control over where books and podcasts are stored. These and the artwork caches for the various libraries will be created on the system drive.


Changing the media folder doesn't change which library is opened, or cause Music to scan the folder for content. You need to press and hold down option as you launch Music, keep holding until asked to choose or create a library, click choose, then browse to and open the old iTunes Library.itl file. You then get to choose where to save the converted library. I would suggest <External>/Music so that Music stops with an error if you try to start it when the drive isn't connected. The prevents the media folder being unexpectedly reset.


tt2

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User profile for user: turingtest2
turingtest2
User level: Level 10
273,033 points

Feb 9, 2021 11:26 AM in response to jeffduneman

If you gather the whole library into a portable shape on the external drive then you can connect to and use it on that external drive with a different computer. When moving to Music from iTunes your old iTunes library needs to be converted to the new Music format. You can choose to save the converted library on the external drive along with the media. The converted library will use the same media folder as before by default. You can do something similar with the TV app. You don't get any control over where books and podcasts are stored. These and the artwork caches for the various libraries will be created on the system drive.


Changing the media folder doesn't change which library is opened, or cause Music to scan the folder for content. You need to press and hold down option as you launch Music, keep holding until asked to choose or create a library, click choose, then browse to and open the old iTunes Library.itl file. You then get to choose where to save the converted library. I would suggest <External>/Music so that Music stops with an error if you try to start it when the drive isn't connected. The prevents the media folder being unexpectedly reset.


tt2

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Itunes Library to new Imac?

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