[wsilvio]

Today I copied my entire Itunes folder to an external hard drive so I could make space on my imac startup drive. In preferences, I pointed Itunes to the new drive and everything seemed cool. I then proceeded to erase the itunes folder on my Imac to fee up the space. When I opened ITunes again, all my playlist and files in my library were there, but Itunes couldn't find them. Is there an easy solution to this? I don't want to have to point every single file to the new drive. I thought this would have ben automatic when I redirected itunes to the new itunes folder on the external drive. Where did I go wrong? Thanks in advance for any help with this.

will

 

[xxbaker]

When you tell iTunes to store it's library somewhere else it doesn't immediately copy the existing music there. What you have to do is File->Library->Consolidate Library or if you're on an older version of iTunes it should be under Advanced->Consolidate Library. When you do that it'll crunch and copy over all of your music to the new location.

Hopefully you haven't emptied your trash yet... otherwise you might have lost your music. Also if the music has copied over but for some reason it can't find them, make sure the library is still pointing in the correct place, then if you quit and restart it should then find the music.

Hopefully this helps.

 

[wsilvio]

xxbaker, thanks for your reply.

I copied the entire Itunes folder from my music folder to the new drive. What I have decided to try is to copy the entire folder back to it's original location on my imac, then consolidate like you said. It's taking a while to copy everything back since it's 140gigs of music. I'll let you know if it works. Otherwise I'll have to rebuild my library. The good news is that I still have all the music so I won't have to re-import everything. I'll just have to import everything to a new library and make new play list. Of course that could take forever with that much music!

 

[wsilvio]

So it worked. I managed to put everything back to normal. Man am I relieved! Now I'm going to move the music folder properly!

 

[xxbaker]

haha that's good to hear. iTunes isn't really intuitive for changing where your library is stored. I was afraid that you would have to reimport your entire library :O

 

[wsilvio]

Yeah, reimporting 140 gigs worth of music doesn't sound too fun! Luckily everything worked out.