Move my iTunes songs from external HD

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Level 1

4 points

Move my iTunes songs from external HD

I own a Dell laptop.

My C: HD crashed and we were unable to retrieve any data. I store my iTunes songs on an external HD and point to that drive to play songs. So there are no songs on my C: drive.

I would like to retain all my songs on my iTunes library. The only way I've been told you can do that is to drag and drop every song folder. That would take hours in my case.

There used to be a function where iTunes would go look for all songs and move them into the iTunes library to view.

Any work around?

iPhone 4S

Posted on Dec 21, 2015 8:30 AM

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Answer 1

brenden dv

Community Specialist

Dec 22, 2015 12:07 PM in response to klindsayiii

Hi klindsayiii,

I'm sorry to hear you are having these issues with iTunes after your recent crash. Depending on how you had iTunes set up, you should have a couple options available. If you had previously moved your entire iTunes library folder to the external hard drive (both the song files and the iTunes database), it should be as simple as selecting that library in iTunes; you may find these articles helpful:

Back up your iTunes library by copying it to an external drive - Apple Support

Open a different iTunes Library file or create a new one - Apple Support

On the other hand, if you were only storing the song files on your external hard drive, you may need to add them back to iTunes. For more information on how to to this, including on how to do it from the menu command and how to leave the files in their current location, you may find these articles more useful:

Import music and video from a computer into iTunes

iTunes 12 for Windows: Change where your iTunes files are stored

Regards

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Answer 2

turingtest2

Level 10

278,297 points

Dec 28, 2015 8:25 AM in response to klindsayiii

See Make a split library portable.

tt2

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