What is the best way to move part of my iTunes library to an external drive?

Chris CA,

In step 7 of your "easily move some of your library" post, how exactly do I select the files in iTunes I want on the external drive?

Thanks in advance.

Ivan Gray wrote:

Chris CA,

In step 7 of your "easily move some of your library" post, how exactly do I select the files in iTunes I want on the external drive?

Same way you select them anywhere.

Click on them.

To keep a better handle on what you have selected to consolidate like that, you could make a playlist first, add the tracks you want to move to the playlist, and then select all in the playlist and right-click and choose to consolidate those files.

But there are some added complexities in doing it this way. iTunes will copy the files and leave the originals in place. To regain that space on your drive, you will need to go into your original iTunes Media folder and find those same files you consolicated to the new location and trash them yourself, manually. This is relatively easy if it's just a few artists, but various albums or tracks could be quite time consuming to find, and it would be unfortunate to accidentally delete something you didn't copy.

But, as I said before, I am the developer of TuneSpan. I made TuneSpan to try to help make this process simple, and clean everythign up for you, as well as more easily keep track of what has been moved through TuneSpan, etc.

TuneSpan is for sale on the Mac App Store. So, if you choose to buy it, of course, I will receive compensation from that... also, I will greatly appreciate it! You can check it out on http://tunespan.com and there is also the beta version available on there that acts as a trial/demo version, but is fully functional.

Not trying to just promote my application here, you don't have to use it if you don't want... but I worked hard to try to help solve these problems without the added complexity, so I think it's relevant. If you have any questions about it, you can contact me directly at http://contact.tunespan.com

Yeah, I'm dunce, figured that out right after I posted.

Thanks!

Chris,

I am trying to follow the instruction in your Jan 18, 2012 post to move some of my iTunes library (Movies) to an external drive. I think I follow & have completed all the way through step 6. Here's where I have problems:

1. In step 7 (Select the files in iTunes you want on the external) I assume I am to find the Movies folder (the files I want stored externally) in the Finder window and left click on it to select it - correct?
2. In step 8 (Right click - Consolidated selected items) I assume I am to right click on the Movies folder & select Consolidate from the pop-up menu ... there is no Consolidate command in the pop-up when I right click.

What am I doing wrong?

J Mark G wrote:

Chris,

I am trying to follow the instruction in your Jan 18, 2012 post to move some of my iTunes library (Movies) to an external drive. I think I follow & have completed all the way through step 6. Here's where I have problems:

In step 7 (Select the files in iTunes you want on the external) I assume I am to find the Movies folder (the files I want stored externally) in the Finder window and left click on it to select it - correct?

No.

Select the movies in iTunes not in the Finder.

hi chris,

i followed your instructions re: moving part of itunes to an external drive. unfortunately, once i delete the files from my internal HD, itunes can't locate the files (tv show). i can manually locate them for itunes, but that sorta defeats the whole point of your method i'd assume. i'm running itunes 11...don't know if that matters. what's strange is that, after yelling at itunes, i ended up "force" shutting down (holding down the power button) for unrelated reasons. after rebooting, i opened itunes and somehow it had relocated all of the files appropriately. i experimented with another tv show, and i could not duplicate this result. itunes can't locate the files of this tv show.

what's going on here? can you help? manually locating won't be an option once i get to my music files. manually locating thousands of music files is out of the question.

i followed the instructions and seemed to work but as soon as i add a new movie to teh collection it start putting the new stuff in the default location. I know in the past i use to be able to move the movie folder and make an alias but that does not seem to work in moutain lion. So how do i move my Movies directory to a NAS and make it stay there even when i buy new movies from itunes or copy something to my libraray?

Thanks to Chris CA for his answer - especially the part that mentions that you can "consolidate...selected items."

Practically pulling my hair out before finding this, because I cannot just drag and drop each batch of 250,000 tunes

onto an external drive, there has to be another way...and Chris CA provided it (and it works!) Thank you sooooo much for this!

Thanks to this thread I've just released 270G's of space on my hard drive - Big thanks to all contributors....

I would like to add a note I found elsewhere for every one as well...

In future when you add items you want to keep on the external drive you will need to hold down the option (alt) key while adding to iTunes so it does not copy them to the internal drive.

Thanks again everyone 🙂

JinjaV6 wrote:

Thanks to this thread I've just released 270G's of space on my hard drive - Big thanks to all contributors....

I would like to add a note I found elsewhere for every one as well...

In future when you add items you want to keep on the external drive you will need to hold down the option (alt) key while adding to iTunes so it does not copy them to the internal drive.

Better yet, simply store the entire iTunes folder on the external.

Then everything will be in one location and far less likely to get messed up.

Also, everything will always get copied into the iTunes folder with no need to hold option (alt).

See also Make a split library portable.

tt2

Hi Chris,

A bit tardy I know but I was searching for this issue and followed your instructions. Seems to work OK. However when I come to delete the films it deleted them from the external drive and not the iTunes library . . . .ah just thought do I need to rename the location to the original name then delete?

Regards

Wait, this is legal right? For movies too.

So I could playback my iTunes movies on a device without iTunes installed? Or is it just iTunes only files?

And is it the same with podcasts?

Is what legal? You can store your files where you chose. Movies from the iTunes Store contain DRM and will need iTunes or an Apple device to play them. Podcasts can be played with any software the plays the particular format.

tt2