Playing music from an external hdd

luckat

I have an external hard drives and approx a million CDs, and would like to get rid of the CDs and put the music on the hard drive (which I also use for backup - it's a 250GB monster).

But if I put the music on, how do I play it on the PowerBook G4?

Ham'nd'egger

luckat wrote:

I have an external hard drives and approx a million CDs, and would like to get rid of the CDs and put the music on the hard drive (which I also use for backup - it's a 250GB monster).

But if I put the music on, how do I play it on the PowerBook G4?

I assume you have music on seperate hard drives cos God love you if you have 1,000,000 CD"s to rip soon to any hard drive! I reckon best way to do it is to decide what you want to move to your Powerbook, then put it all into a folder (or folders) and zap it over via Firewire then drag the folder to iTunes on the Powerbook. That or make MP3 discs and rip them independantly.

luckat

Well, not literally a million, just enough to be annoying.

My PB's hard drive is getting a bit crowded (40GB) and so I'd prefer to store my music on the external drive. But I'm a bit hazy about how I'd play it in that case. At the moment, my main stuff is in iTunes (on the PowerBook), and otherwise I slot in a CD if I want to hear something, though that's kind of slow and overheating.

babypink

basically tell itunes that a particular folder on the big external hard drive is the new music library, and then assuming that your present collection is already in itunes, tell it to consolidate the music library....that ought collate everthing into the one library.

alternatively see Han'nd'egger's bit on copying the files/folders to the new HD manually

deevey

For my traktor dj setup i did this .. i already had about 15gigs of music on my lappie and wanted everything external ..

1. In itunes prefs > advanced .. set music folder to a folder on your external drive

2. highlight all files in itunes .. hit delete .. when asked do you want to move the files to trash press "no"...

Go to your music folder > itunes > i tunes music ..

drag the whole folder into itunes.. it will copy all the music files to your new hard drive and any CD rips you do while the external drive is plugged in will go directly to the new drive..

If you rip stuff when the drive is out it will copy into the regular itunes > itunes music folder though..

Oh yeah on a side note consoldatiing the library and not deleing/recreating it, i ended up with 2 copies of alot of tracks in the library .. which was kinda annoying .. might just be my lappie though needing a spring clean .. :P

Ham'nd'egger

deevey wrote:

For my traktor dj setup i did this .. i already had about 15gigs of music on my lappie and wanted everything external ..

1. In itunes prefs > advanced .. set music folder to a folder on your external drive

2. highlight all files in itunes .. hit delete .. when asked do you want to move the files to trash press "no"...

Go to your music folder > itunes > i tunes music ..

drag the whole folder into itunes.. it will copy all the music files to your new hard drive and any CD rips you do while the external drive is plugged in will go directly to the new drive..

If you rip stuff when the drive is out it will copy into the regular itunes > itunes music folder though..

Oh yeah on a side note consoldatiing the library and not deleing/recreating it, i ended up with 2 copies of alot of tracks in the library .. which was kinda annoying .. might just be my lappie though needing a spring clean .. :P

It sounds obvious to say, but do bear in mind that if you have stuff stored on an external drive, it will need to be connected and/or networked to your PB for you to be able to access that library.

Also, when you go to add songs to your library, you will as Babypink says, need to consolidate every so often to tidy all into one home, unlike a certain someone who deleted 4 duplicated folders of music once and accidentally threw out all his purchased music as he didn't bother to check which was which :mad:

luckat

Thanks for these helpful replies; will spend a weekend getting rid of my CDs and putting htem on the hard drive soon.