itunes from external hard drive

Gumbo

hi guys,

my friend is buying an ipod on friday and he has just asked me if you can import all your music into itunes from an external hardrive?

i know everytime he wants to use itunes, he will have to plug in the external drive, but he says he has no probs with that.

can this be done?

i think the idea is so he wont be filling up his laptop with tons of music and videos etc

thanks,
keith.

witnessmenow

Yeah it can be done. I recomend changing the External hard drive letter to something obscure (like the Y: Drive or something) because if you were to plug your hard drive in without doing this (it would default to F: drive or something) and load all your music on to itunes it would work grand but if you were to have a memory stick in before pluggin in the hard drive it might chance to the G: drive and itunes will no longer have the correct location of your songs.

It easy to do.

Plug in hard drive and power it on.

click Start--->run

enter: " diskmgmt.msc " without brackets and spaces

Find the external hard drive name and right click on it

click "change drive letter and paths"

hit change and select an obscure letter

Voula! Thats it , everytime you plug your hard drive in now it should default to that letter keeping your itunes working properly

Gumbo

cheers,

he has just expanded on his original question now

he wants to plug in his external hard drive, save all his music and videos etc to the external har drive and also save itunes to the external hard drive.

so now he has aeverything on the external hard drive, not clogging up his laptop, but his main concern is, if he buys a new laptop in 2 years he has all his music synced externally so he wont have to reload his music then.


kinda leads me onto a question for myself, if i loose my laptop or upgrade next year, do i loose all my music on my ipod as its synced from my c drive?

witnessmenow

Is he talking about installing itunes to the external HD?

I'm sure it can be done but itunes is only 30-40mb , surel he could get away with that!! Also if you install to your hard drive i dont think it will work on any other pcs. Most programs write to your pc registry regardless of where you install it, so its likely that whatever pc your trying to run it from ,other than the one you installed it from , registries wont be right. I'd advise installing it on the laptop and carrying around the itunes setup file on the hard drive.

no, if you lose your ipod there is 2 ways of getting your music back.

1.(easy way) Download a program to do it for you. Iagent and idump are two programs that should do it(google them)

2.(makes you feel like your hacking kind of a way!) Install itunes on a pc.

go into itunes options and tell it to "orgainize your music collection" AND tell it to "copy music into your itunes library".

Plug in your ipod, if it automatically updated with your old pc make sure you answer negatively to the question about linking with this library, i.e tell it to move nothing over

go to my computer and click on the ipod. up the top of the folder click tools>folder option

Click the view tab and select "show hidden files and folders"

now go back to itunes click file.add folder to library

navigate to your ipod and select the music folder

let it do its thing!!



Sorry about the delay in the post completely forgot about the thread!

Gumbo

cheers mate, i will pass it on, helps meout too

coreilly1

good thread,had this question for this situation too.Nice one!

witnessmenow

No problem

Holmer

go to edit>preferences>advanced>iTunes music folder location>
manually change it to F:/iTunes (or E:/iTunes, if that's what you called the external drive)

Gumbo

witnessmenow wrote: »

No problem

hey, i started it LOL