I have about 700 gig of music (my old CD collection) on a windows formatted external HD in iTunes. Can I access/play the playlist on that external drive using my newly purchased Mac? Haven't figured it out yet. 700 Gig is to much to transfer to the new Mac. Thanks!
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.1)
What exactly is on this drive? If only media then yes, you can play it. The problem is with a Windows formatted drive (NTFS) you cannot edit files so if you want to change track information it may be tricky. If the drive is FAT formatted you can edit with a Mac but generally Windows drives are NTFS formatted. Since it is only media you can add the media to iTunes and keep it on the drive either by changing the preferences in iTunes to not copy added media to your media folder, or hold down the option/alt key while dragging media to iTunes.
If the whole iTunes folder is on there you can start iTunes using your Window library by holding down the option key while starting iTunes and selecting the iTunes Library.itl in the iTunes folder on the external. In this case, however, there will definitely be problems is the drive is formatted for Windows use because of not being able to write to the drive. You can look into purchasing software which will allow this. I am not going to go into all the details of everything because it would take too much time to type in all the options at this stage until we know more about your drive and what exactly you want to do.
Thanks for the reply and help. The drive was only for my CD collection so I loaded iTunes on there and imported every CD I had. There's nothing else, and it is NTFS formatted.
So yes, the whole iTunes folder is on there. Are you saying that I will not be able to hold down the option key on iTunes start up and select the library from the Windows hard drive? That's kind of what I was hoping to be able to do. I haven't unpacked my external drive yet, I just moved.
Do I really need to write to the drive if I am just playing music?
You still haven' t really told me what's on the drive. "iTunes" refers only to the application, not your library, and a library is more than media files. A complete library is everything in the iTunes folder which includes special library files, artwork folders, and various other files and folders. The library files tell iTunes what to show you and how when you open the application, otherwise all you have are a bunch of media files on a drive and not really "iTunes".
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391
You can play a file on NTFS, for example in Quicktime Player. However, if you have your library files on the drive, you want to start iTunes from them, then you do anything at all in iTunes such as try to play a file, iTunes needs to re-write the library file with the updated play count information but can't since it can only read NTFS, not write. Then too if you wanted to change the artist name a bit on a track iTunes will need to write the change to the library file as well as the media file, but won't be able to do either with NTFS unless you install special software enabling NTFS (which isn't ideal).
Standard recommendations in this scenario are:
1) If you need to use the drive with both Mac and NTFS then buy software for either the Mac or the PC which enables using the other platform's drive format. Alternatively if none of your files are bigger than 4GB you can use FAT format (still some disadvantages with Mac use).
2) If only for Mac use, store the files on another drive temporarily and reformat the drive to Mac Extended (which erases the drive) using Disk Utility.
Access windows iTunes playlist
