How do I download itunes match music to an external drive?

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9 points

How do I download itunes match music to an external drive?

Hi Everyone,

I am currently travelling and to keep my family's sanity, took me with me my MBA laptop and an external drive to where I copied my music /library from my iMac. My laprop iTunes library pointed to the external drive location of all music.

Frustratingly, my hard drive crashed (showing error prompting to initialize, Disk Warrior couldn't recover data only partially). Since the only data on the external hard drive are my 20GB of music, which I have synced using iTunes Match, I am wondering if I can get around this frustrating incident by downloading the music to my hard drive.

When I start up iTunes, it still shows the entire library but with the actual files missing whenever I try to play an item, it asks me to locate it. Is there a way to force iTunes to download the library?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

-Alex

MacBook Air (13-inch Late 2010), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 17, 2013 7:52 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 29, 2017 5:35 PM in response to Michael Allbritton

DO NOT FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS. IF YOU DELETE USING OPT + DELETE, YOU ARE DELETING YOUR LIBRARY FROM EVERYWHERE, LOCAL AND CLOUD (AND MATCH, IF YOU USE MATCH). CALL APPLE TECH SUPPORT BEFORE YOU DELETE ANYTHING FROM YOUR ITUNES LIBRARY!!

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Answer 2

May 17, 2013 10:00 PM in response to ak2k

First you need to delete the "tracks" from the iTunes library so they will become able to be downloadable. Highlight the tracks and type Option+Delete on the keyboard, do not hide/delete the tracks in the cloud.

Now open iTunes prefs > Advanced and make sure the location of the library is the external HDD. Close the prefs, hightlight the tracks you want to download, right click (or Control+Click) and choose "download." I suggest you do just a few tracks at a time, rather than trying to download everything at once.

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Answer 3

Sep 30, 2017 12:55 AM in response to Jon Pines

Hi,

You are responding to a post that is over 4 yrs old. These instructions were correct at the time.

You now have the option to remove download which will keep track in the iCloud music library.

Jim

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