iTunes Library Question: Migrating Some Songs

[amagikoen]

I hit 75% of my hard drive capacity in iTunes and decided to put my external hard drive to work. After messing with smart playlists, I decided on five gigs or so to keep on my local computer while moving the rest of the songs to an external hard drive. I thought that if I just moved them to the other hard drive, I could keep one library with only 1800 songs or so available when I wasn't plugged in.

When I tried to play a moved song, it prompted me to chose the location of the item. I was hoping for a more automatic finding process.

I looked at this hint (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051119134344700&query=itunes), but it wasn't quite what I wanted.

Is there any way to make iTunes auto-search for music like it does when you first run the program? Then I could move all I need to move and have it auto-reappear when I plug in at home with my iBook.

Maxwell.
10.4.6, 6.0.3

[Bigc]

Not sure but I think if you put what songs you want on an external drive, use Add To Library in iTunes menu (first turn off Keep iTunes Library organized and Copy files to iTunes). Then after all the songs are Added through "Add To Library", turn back on copy tunes to iTunes and organize setting your Library to your songs on the iBook.

All of the songs will show in your library all the time but the ones on the external drive won't be found when it is not connected. When at home plug in drive and it should find them. Use a Play List with all the tune in your iBook library when the external is not connected.

Think that will work...

[EatsWithFingers]

If you change the location of your library to the external disk, then iTunes should be able to find all the songs. If iTunes cannot find the external disk (i.e. when it is not conencted) then the library location is automatically reset (to the default location for the music on your iBook). Note that this change is NOT permanent - if you quit iTunes, connect to the external disk, then restart iTunes, the library will return to the external drive.

If this doesn't work, then as BigC states, you will have to re-add the songs on the external drive, ONCE YOU HAVE CHANGED THE LIBRARY LOCATION (so that they do not actually move). This should make iTunes ask if you want to replace existing songs (or it may do that automatically).

Additionally, creating playlists for the two separate locations (as BigC suggests) is a good idea -- the only difficulty is that you cannot identify songs based on their locations.

The only problem is that if you want to swap which location you add new songs to (i.e. change the iTunes library location) then it can take a little while to ensure that it has all the songs correctly named etc.