[Snyderwriter]

Only having 30 MB on my internal hard drive, I picked up a 60 gb portable (EZQuest), moved my iTunes library to it, changed the library location in iTunes preferences, and deleted the library from my internal drive. Problem is, when I go to play a song, iTunes still looks for it in my internal hard drive, and can't find it. The only solution I can come up with is clicking and locating each individual song, but there are more than 2,000, so I'm not looking forward to that. Any suggestions as to how to make iTunes realize the library is still there, and it's only been used?

[pdrayton]

I touched on that issue in my post here..

I highly recommend the iTunes Library Manager. I use it now to switch back and forth between libraries (one on the Mac mini hard drive and one on the external drive). Works great... and is very fast! It comes with two scripts... one that exports files to another library and one that imports from another library... make sure you get the latest version of those 2 scripts.

[Snyderwriter]

I'm a a complete loss here. I downloaded the program and used it -- per the read me -- to create an external library that was a duplicate of my internal drive's library, including using the consolidate music function in itunes to copy all of the audio files. All seemed to work well. I selected the external library and was using it, but when I deleted the internal library, it couldn't find any tracks. All that leads me to believe it was reading the files on the internal drive all along.
Has anyone moved their music folder before? I'm sure I'm not the first to try this. I only want to be able to do this without having to rebuild my library and recreate all of my playlists.

[Snyderwriter]

Well, should anyone have a similar problem, I found out a solution, though it many not be the easiest one. (If anybody knows an easier one, I'd love to learn about it for future reference.)

1. Back up everything before doing this.
2. Export your current library. File > Export Library. This saves all the playlists, ratings, etc. as an XML file.
3. Quit iTunes
4. Got to your home > Music > iTunes and drag the iTunes folder to the trash. (You don't need to empty the trash, so you can always drag it back out if you need to restore.)
5. Launch iTunes. You will have an empty library and no play list.
6. Go to the advanced tab in the preferences (in the iTunes menu), and choose the new location for your music folder. Also check "Copy music to iTunes Music folder when adding to library."
7. Got to File > Open, and select your old music file. This will import all of the new music into your new music file and into your library.
8. File > Import. Select the library XML file you Exported in step 2. This will restore your play lists, ratings, etc. (Note, if any of the songs in your old music folder are not in your current music folder, they will not show up in the play lists.
9. After making sure everything is working, trash your old music folder.
I had a few songs from my old library which iTunes couldn't find. I suspect they were files that were deleted from the hard drive but not the library database. Also, the one thing that didn't transfer is the original date added. Not something I particuarly cared about.
Bill

[pdrayton]

Glad it worked.
I thought the directions were in the ReadMe file... there was a lot of reading to do to figure out which method to use.
There is that one scary moment when it appears all your music is gone (and the instructions do let you know it will happen)... but then it pops up again.
Thanks for posting the detailed instructions... it will help others a lot. I really find iTunes Library Manager to be quite handy... I have my entire library in AAC format on the Mac mini, and the same library in Apple Lossless on a 1.5TB external drive. Way cool.

[Snyderwriter]

I thought it would work too. He gives explicit intruction on how to create an external library either "from scratch" or keep your current songs and play lists. I took the latter option and figured I could just delete the old Music file. I was wrong. So it goes. Perhaps there is a way to do it using the bonus scripts. I emailed Doug to see if I was missing anything, but haven't heard back. At $5 per license, I can't fairly expect too much support. Once I figured out something that would work, though, I was too tired and frustrated to try something new. The utility does look quite useful, though. Especially if I chose to keep a smaller libray on my internal drive.
Apple really needs an "update library" function that compares the library to songs in your Music folder, and allows you to update the location of a moved Music Folder (instead of the current way of updating the location of each song.) I suspect that there's an easier approach, but I couldn't find it.
A word of warning: a few of the music files (about 30 out of more than 2,200, didn't transfer and showed up in the library file as streams. So, it's not a perfect system.