>Some of the things you state about your setup sound slightly contradictory so I am not clear on exactly how things are set up.
how so?
its a pretty common setup. i think most of my friends who use itunes do exact same thing. Their music collection is on external device. music is not stored locally on the computer...not on the laptop or the imac...but instead on a portable device, a NAS or a DAS.
A NAS works by mapping a drive letter and you access the music via the network, hence this requires mapping a drive letter to access the NAS since it has an IP on the LAN.
A DAS which is what a USB 3 portable hard drive would be, has the benefit of being much much faster since it hard wired directly to the computer, similar to a NAS but no network, no IP needed, simpler and faster.
I have copied all my music, the folder \MP3 to my new device, the 8TB USB hdd. I unmount the NAS. now itunes can't see the NAS. Nor can it see my music tracks, they are all missing - and thats expected.
what I wish to do is point all those songs to its new path.....but i see no method of doing this.
on my imac, itunes syncs music to my devices by using the NAS, thus there are no songs on mp3 tracks on the local computer. every mp3 track that syncs to my devices is done via the NAS, since thats where they are stored.
>If you have the entire library (= entire iTunes folder) on the NAS you need to drag the library folder to the other drive. Start iTunes while holding down the option/alt key, select the iTunes Library.itl in the iTunes folder in its new location.
this wont work because iTunes thinks its folder is local on my computer. youa re suggesting I move the itunes folder to the 8TB hdd but doing that does not help since the mp3 files dont copy over and itunes still cant find the songs. all the playlists fail to see the songs because they think its on the F:\ drive which was the NAS mapped drive letter.
>try copying the files to the new drive, making sure the new drive has exactly the same name and folder structure as the old one so iTunes is tricked into thinking nothing has changed.
i was hoping to try that method but fails because itunes is looking for a Drive letter F:\ as part of the file/folder structure....
so i'm stuck, i cant seem to find a simple easy solution.
it baffles me how something so simple is so painful and tedious to fix.
are you telling me, me and my friends are the only ppl who store mp3s externally?
what happens when your hdd gets too small and wish to move songs to a bigger hdd?
if i tell itunes to consolidate and points itunes to the folder \mp3 on my usb device it made a horrible mess of everything....
i had 5 TB of neatly organized music albums by category....after 2 days of letting itunes conslidate it have taken almost every folder and sorted them like 1 track per folder.
which meant if i wanted to copy an album say ACDC- hells bells, I had to do a search for it because it had totally changed the folder structure and category and had placed some tracks of the album into another sub folder.
in essence find the album to copy it to another device became tedious and took more time.
so I deleted that folder itunes consolidated. and started over again.. i had a backup. thus why i dont let itunes organize my music, its lame and jsut does not work for me. i am happy to manage my own folder structure.
what i can figure out is how to tell itunes how to locate my mp3 files, without having to find each track one by one.
finally
i asked my friends, what did they do when their 1tb hdd was too small for their growing mp3 collection.....their answer...was a long groan n moan, stating they deleted itunes, plus the itunes folder. install itunes a new. than simply drag and drop one by one each album or folder they wanted on their itunes so as to sync to devices.
in essence starting over. There does not seem to be any other way which seems horrible to me.
you ahve to delete your playlists and all songs in your collection...in itunes...than go to File>add library (basically same as drag n drop a folder into itunes, than create a playlist from selected songs.
i am trying to avoid this because with 5TB of music and about 300 playlists, its going to take me weeks to recreate my playlists plus get album artwork (which is not so bad as most folders on my NAS have a picture of the album.