Should and how can I run my music off an external HDD

I recently purchased a Western Digital My book 1TB for a cheap price and being I have a 40 Gig music collection I figured it would be a great idea to run my music off this drive. Here is why, 1. my machine some how only has 9 gigs left, I am moving 60 gigs of video over to this external drive, 2. I only listen to my music at home, aside from my iPod I just use my cars CD Changer I rarely listen to music off my lappy I just use it to burn CD's and update my iPod.

Here is what I am afraid of, firstly I run iTunes I have a 2 year old Sony Vaio SZ 430N and although my music is centrally located I don't want to open iTunes one day and see exclamation marks next to all my songs. I also don't want to delete my library and reload it as this would be a massive pain in the as well as terrifying. Is this even worth it? and if so how should I go about moving my iTunes Library. Thanks in advance I am a complete noob with PC's and I still cant understand why my drive is eating itself.

 

If your system is eating drive space, you might have a Restore Point or auto-backup utility running that's making daily backups of a large amount of files. Such utilities, if not monitored, can eat up even large drives' space real fast. If you're not sure how to check for it, ask someone you know with more experience to check for any scheduled backup utilities running.

For an external drive, all you have to do is copy the folders holding your music to the external. Always do a copy/paste, never a move. Delete the original files manually after you're sure they're copied to the new location. It's just faster. Once they're copied to the external, just point your media player to the external folders to access the files.

 

Also, regarding your question on iTunes

If you copy/paste all your music folders, then delete the original ones, iTunes will show exclamation marks next to all the songs it can't find.

As long as all of them have been copied properly, you can just clear the library, and then choose to add the folders that hold your music on your external.

it will take time with 40Gb, and be a pain, but that's how it is
iTunes can be a biach at times

Good luck
Hope this helps

 

http://lifehacker.com/software/itun...tunes-library-to-an-external-drive-238296.php

Not sure if that works with the most current itewns but its worth a shot

edit, they moved consolidate library to file -> library -> consolidate library

 

^^^^^^^^

Thanks for that mike

I knew there had to be a way to get it to scan all the files with exclamation marks, instead of one at time

I may give it a try if I move my music to an xternal drive

 

NP, hopefully that works well, I know from re-importing 40ish GB into my library on a Q6600 @ 3.8ghz that its no picnic reloading all those songs, wasn't terrible on that machine but i coulda done without it...

 

What do you mean with "instead of one at time" ?!
Why wouldn't you just add ALL files directly? Instead of one after one after one after one.... If that is what you meant.

 

That being said I should be OK if I point the player in a new direction and it dosent recognize the files because all the data I changed i.e. track album and artist names will have been saved into the file. The issue I have is iTunes is reading off the iTunes created folder and I just dragged 98% of my music from a self made music folder.

 

I meant files with an exclamation next to them, I thought the only way you could re-find them was by double clicking and browsing and then choosing where the new file was found.

I don't choose files one at a time when adding as that would be DUMB

Sorry, but I don't quite get what you mean???

Are you worried you'll lose all the changes you made to songs yourself like names and stuff???

 

So I screwed it up but thats alright I copied all the data over to the External Drive and dragged it into iTunes I think I lost a couple hundred tracks but thats no biggie thanks to the wonderful world of music piracy and torrents (music was originally purchased legally)

 

Glad to hear you did it

Too bad about those tracks man

But there always is torrents

 

Actually I gained a couple hundred tracks because iTunes tripled some albums I am sorting through it slowly but cant beat having the extra 40 gigs on my machine