PLEASE HELP. Idont know how to run itunes in external hard drive

[Incogneato]

I just wiped my macbooks hard drive and have all of my music along with everything now on an external harddrive. but i dont know how to run my songs in itunes without having the songs be permanently on my hard drive. I even went to itunes preferences, and set the location as a folder in my ext. hd. that has my itunes librarys and mp3s but to no avail.

thanks a lot for your help

 

[Ulrik]

Have you tried downloading a version of i-tunes to your external drive and running it from there?

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

This is one way to achieve it:

• Move the files to the external, that is copy the whole iTunes Music Folder to Ext,
• Change the library location in iTunes Preferences ~> Advanced,
• Copy the iTunes folder with your Library/ies to the Ext. HD.
• Quit itunes and delete the iTunes Music Folder on the Mac's HD.
• Restart itunes (you'll most likely see nothing in the Genre/Artist/Album, etc ... )
• Go to File ~> Add To Library .. Navigate to the new itunes folder.

Ensure that before you Launch/Quit iTunes, you have first mounted/unmounted the Ext HD.

I found the following at this link:

How To: keep your iTunes library on an external hard drive

As you might expect, this also means that managing an iPod with this setup can get quirky too. If you sync your iPod with iTunes, and you connect it while your library is unplugged, iTunes will freak out and, after a few moments, warn you that it can't update your iPod because none of your media is present. However: this doesn't remove any music from your iPod, and your iTunes media will be playable once you connect your drive again. A lot of those 'file not found' exclamation points will appear next to your songs in the iTunes media list after a scenario like this, but don't panic: once you reconnect your drive (and/or restart iTunes; that one's up to you), all your media will play and sync just fine again. I've tested this with both a 5G iPod and a nano.

As with everything on a Mac, there are always several ways to do the same task. The info at the above link may be slightly different to my own advice but you can see that the choice is yours ...
Hope this helps.