Tech: iTunes on external drive - question

Subject: Tech: iTunes on external drive - question
From: G-Force
Date: 04 Apr 10 - 12:07 PM

I'm probably being thick here, but I'm in a bit of a tangle.

About 2 years ago I got an iPod and recently a second one. As our computer (PC running XP) is only little, I copied iTunes onto our 500-gig external drive and have been happily working in there, creating two libraries, one for each iPod. However, I notice that all the tracks also go into 'My Music' on the C-drive so our poor old computer is filling up anyway.

As an experiment, I deleted a track from My Music and it also disappeared from the relevant library on the external drive.

So, how do I go about sorting this out so I'm only working on the external drive and not filling up the C-drive? Can I move My Music onto the external drive, or will this stop iTunes working? Perhaps I should have moved iTunes there, rather than just copying it.

As I am a fairly clueless old git, answers in words of one sill a bull would be much appreciated, especially if they don't mean losing the contents of my libraries.

Subject: RE: Tech: iTunes on external drive - question
From: SteveMansfield
Date: 04 Apr 10 - 02:41 PM

Have a look at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1364 which should tell you all you need to know. I suspect, given the all-round flakiness of iTunes, that the whole thing will crash and burn if the external drive is ever absent at boot, so you might want to bear that in mind and consider fitting a second physical hard disk to your machine if you can't face the joys of doing a complete reinstall on a bigger primary drive.

I run my iTunes library on a separate partition on the same physical hard drive and it seems to cope with that alright, but does still maintain a small (under 10 Mb) folder under the My Music directory (I'm now on W7, but only upgraded recently and IIRC, XP behaved similarly).

iTunes is a hideous piece of bloated counter-intuitive hammered-together the-Heath-Robinson-estate-would-sue-if-I-called-it-Heath-Robinson software, which is such a *huge* pity because the iPods themselves are absolutely fabulous bits of kit. If only iPods would accept management from Windows Media Player or Winamp ...

Subject: RE: Tech: iTunes on external drive - question
From: G-Force
Date: 05 Apr 10 - 07:56 AM

Thanks for that. I looked in Help but didn't find that.

I will follow what it says and hopefully all will be OK - I must admit I haven't had too much trouble with iTunes in the past. But copying tracks from CD to iTunes seems to be slower recently. I don't know if it's down to the upgrade to iTunes 9.