Moving your library to a larger hard drive

Less compression equals higher sound quality. But it also equals larger files. Even if you keep your music files relatively small, it’s pretty easy to clog up a computer’s hard drive with music. The easiest solution is to transfer your library to an external hard drive. And because the cost of these devices continue to fall, you don’t need a fortune to get an external drive large enough to comfortably house tens of thousands of high-resolution audio files.

Relocating your iTunes library to an external drive is fairly straightforward. Start by connecting your new drive to your PC through your computer’s USB port. In the iTunes “Preferences” folder, select the Advanced Settings. Under the “Advanced” tab (sometimes “General” tab in earlier versions of iTunes), there’s a place to change the iTunes Music folder location (make sure both “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library” are checked).

Using the “Browse” function, select the new drive and hit “OK.” This changes the default location of the iTunes music library, so that everything you add to iTunes from that point forward will go straight to the new drive.

The final step was to go to the iTunes “Edit” menu, and select “Library.” From that drop-down menu, choose “Consolidate Library” (older versions have this under the “Advanced” menu). This starts iTunes copying its library to the new drive. The nice thing about this process is that all of your music’s metadata is preserved: play count, album art, year of release and so on.

Since this creates a copy of your library, you can check to make sure the transfer worked before deleting the library off your computer’s drive. When you’re ready to clear the iTunes library off your PC, be careful to delete the music the right way. You should only delete the actual music files inside the iTunes folder (it’s the one marked “iTunes music” and has the artist folders in it). In order for iTunes to function, the other folders need to remain untouched.

When you’re finished, you’ll have room to grow your iTunes library without stinting on sound quality, and your computer will probably run a little better as well.

Moving your library off a laptop

While the process for moving your iTunes library is the same for both a laptop and desktop computer, there are a few additional things to consider with a portable PC. Chances are you’ll be plugging in and unplugging the external drive as you move from location to location.

If you leave iTunes open and disconnect the external drive, iTunes will reset itself to make the laptop’s C drive the default library location. Although all the songs remained listed in iTunes, if you click on any, an exclamation mark will appear in front of them to denote an unknown address. Any songs you import while the external drive is disconnected will be stored in the laptop’s memory.

When you reconnect the hard drive, you’ll have to go into the iTunes “Preferences” menu and then to the “Advanced” tab to change the address of the library back to the folder on the external drive (you can find this under the “Advanced” menu in older versions). Select “update” and wait a minute or so while iTunes reestablishes all the connections between its listings and the music files on the external drive. Any new music you imported remains stored on the laptop.

iTunes will also reset its library location to the C drive if you open the program before connecting the external drive to the laptop.

Fortunately, there’s a simple work-around that avoids all that: just remember to close iTunes before disconnecting the external drive and open it only after reconnecting the drive. As far as iTunes knows, the connection between it and the external drive was never broken. You won’t have to re-establish file links and any new additions will automatically go to the external drive, where they belong.

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