[kwitel]

Im at about 75gigs of an 80gb internal drive on my laptop.
Its slowing everything down and im flat out running out of space.
How much of a hassle would it be to have iTunes read music from the external drive as opposed to the internal?

Can someone explain how I go about doing this and if and what the downside is with using an external drive?

 

[Wodgy]

It's really easy. Just go into iTunes preferences, go to the Advanced tab, and change your library location to the external drive.

 

[tennisplyr3]

cut + paste your music from your laptop's HD to the external. add the location of your new library to your itunes. it's not too much of a hassle. the only hassle is turning on your external everytime you want to hear music, and sometimes if you emulate drives, the designated drive letter of it may change as well (there's a fix for it online... somewhere. i forget where.) so you might have to re-add your library. but most people don't do any drive emulation (alcohol 120% or daemon tools), so you shouldn't have any problem with this.

if you're traveling around, then it's a pain in the butt to plug in your external every time you wish to hear music. also, you might have to deal with the motor noise that your external makes (if it makes any at all).

 

[MonkeysAteMe]

External drives are a little slower (firewire would be faster than USB), but for music they are plenty fast. It's what I use and it runs without any delay (just don't run programs off of it).

 

[GreatDane]

That's what I do for my music library, I use a USB powered external drive...velcro'd to the back of my laptop screen . You can buy a 160 GB for less than $90. I also have a second backup on an AC powered 200 GB drive.

 

[cconnaker]

been doing it for a long time. external 750GB firewire 800 drive and never going back.

 

[grawk]

You don't need to cut and paste, just change the location in itunes preferences, and then tell it to consolidate your library.

 

[kwitel]

Thanks for all the responses guys.

Should I buy a USB drive that doesnt need its own power supply?
Where is "consolidate library" located and what does it do?
Lastly, when I download a new song(s) or import a new CD, will it save that info to the external drive?

Sorry for all the questions...

 

[grawk]

Buy a drive that needs a power supply, unless you need to use it portably. Get a 3.5" external, not a laptop drive. They're faster and more durable.

Consolidate library is under the advanced tab, and it moves everything to where you've defined your library to be.

 

[tennisplyr3]

oh i forgot about the consolidate library option. yeah, that works, too. i don't use itunes much.

 

[jpstereo]

Is this procedure similar for my winodws Media music files?

 

[milkpowder]

Quote:

Originally Posted by grawk /img/forum/go_quote.gif You don't need to cut and paste, just change the location in itunes preferences, and then tell it to consolidate your library.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tennisplyr3 /img/forum/go_quote.gif oh i forgot about the consolidate library option. yeah, that works, too. i don't use itunes much.

"Consolidate Library..." is the way forward

I also use external HDDs (500GB WD My Book for music), albeit only in the USB form. IMO, it isn't entirely satisfactory. When using foobar (0.9.5 beta 6, otachan-SSRC, ASIO) the gapless playback doesn't really quite work as seamlessly as advertised, especially when the songs are very short in length (eg tracks in Handel's Messiah). I wonder if this is a problem with the external HDDs spinning down having already cached the song (I use full 256,000kb file cache) and then needing to spin up again to read the next song. Anyone also have the same problem with (large capacity ie >250gb) external HDDs? Anyway, this not-so-gapless-playback doesn't seem to manifest itself in iTunes 7 so it might be the way I've configured my foobar.

 

[mrwinick]

Yesterday I connected a new WD 500gb my book. I've been having problems with jitter today. Any way to fix that?

 

[fault151]

best thing you can do is buy a huge external hard drive and run your itunes of that. Two concerns with this idea:

1. you need to have your hard drive on all the time to access the music file. This is fine if you have a desktop but not a laptop.

2. The external hard drive is slower that you internal drive. It may take a split second longer to access the files on demand.

Otherwise it works great!

If you need any help sorting files and structure out let me know.

 

[milkpowder]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrwinick /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yesterday I connected a new WD 500gb my book. I've been having problems with jitter today. Any way to fix that?

I'm guessing you have the USB version? Do you also use foobar?