How to Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive

Does your iTunes media library hogging up too much space on your computer? I'm Donald Bell and I'm here to show you how to run your iTunes library from an external hard drive. If you have a massive iTunes library filled with gigs and gigs of music, movies and podcasts, it’s not idea to offload that content to a separate external or internal hard drive. But transferring your library isn't as obvious as dragging and dropping your music folder onto an external drive. It’s not hard but to do it right, you got to let iTunes do the work for you. To get started, open iTunes and make sure the drive you want to move your library to is connected to your computer and ready to go. Next, go into your iTunes preferences. On a PC you'll find this under the edit menu, for Mac, it’s under the iTunes menu. Click under the advanced tab and where it says iTunes music folder location, change the location to the desired folder on your external drive. Next, make sure the copy files to iTunes music folder option is checked off. This ensures that any new content you download or rip into iTunes gets transferred to the new location. After that, hit the OK button. Now, there’s one more step to take before iTunes really starts moving your library to a new location, but, before we commit your computer to what could be a few hours of transfer time, why not take a moment to do some general iTunes housekeeping. Delete any old podcast you're not listening to, maybe some movies or TV shows you never plan on watching again. The point is, there’s probably a lot of junk in your iTunes library that you don’t need to waste time copying. You'll thank me later. Now, when you're ready to make the transfer, click on the file menu on iTunes, then select Library and select Consolidate Library. This is going to take all of the files referenced by iTunes on your computer, your movies, music, audiobooks, podcasts, TV shows and copy to the new location. It will take some time and remember, it’s not deleting the old files, it’s just copying them to the new location. If you're feeling confident, you can delete the files living in your old iTunes music folder after the transfer is complete but be cautious. If you don’t feel sure about what you're doing, it can't hurt to use the backup to disc feature in iTunes so that you can restore your library in case something goes wrong. Once the dust has settled and all of your precious iTunes content has made the journey over to the new hard drive, you can finally pat yourself on the back. Unless the hard drive is powered off or disconnected, iTunes will remember to load your library from the external drive every time it launches. Without the drive connected, iTunes will still function for things like streaming podcasts and internet radio, or downloading stuff from the iTunes store but you won't be able to play your library content without connecting it back up to the drive. For CNET.com, I'm Donald Bell helping you to give your iTunes library a little extra breathing room.