As the years go by and you accumulate more digital photos, videos and songs - you quickly realize how important and precious storage space is on your computer and other devices. If you are someone that has a large iTunes library filled with music, movies, podcasts and more - you might want to consider storing this library on an external drive versus the local storage of your computer. Doing so will free up space on your computer without compromising the iTunes experience you are used to.
2020-3-14 Not with a flash drive, but with an external drive. I've kept my iTunes library on a USB-attached drive for years now. Semantically, the situation is identical to storing it on the flash drive. The OS see's a remote disk in both cases. Format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Most flash media come pre-formatted as FAT32 these days.
If you are not aware of what is taking up space on your computer, you can click on the Apple logo in the upper-left hand corner of the desktop, select “About this Mac”, then “More Info…”, and then finally click the “Storage” tab toward the top of the window. You will see a succinct storage breakdown of your computer’s hard drive. If the your computer is nearly full, you might want to consider migrating your iTunes library to an external hard drive.
If the Storage view of About This Mac does not help you make sense of what’s taking up space on your hard drive, give this post of ours a read.
If your iTunes library does not take up much space, you may not need or want to transfer it to an external hard drive. To find out how large your library is, open the Finder application and then navigate through the following folders: Music > iTunes > iTunes Media.
The “Music” folder should appear in the sidebar of Finder. If it does not, click the “Finder” option in the desktop toolbar and select “Preferences…”. Click the “Sidebar” option toward the top of the window and make sure “Music” is check-marked.
Once you’ve found the “iTunes Media” folder in Finder, select it and use the hotkey command + i on your keyboard. This will pull up an info pane where you will be able to see the size of your Library. The iTunes Media folder contains the raw files of content stored in iTunes, so knowing the size of this folder will tell you how much space you can save by migrating your iTunes library to an external drive.
How to Setup an iTunes Library on an External Drive
Step 1: Transfer iTunes media folder to your external drive
Once you’ve connected an external drive to your computer, you are going to want to go back into the Finder application. This process will be easiest if you open two Finder windows. You can do this by selecting File > New Finder Window. Next, navigate back to the iTunes Media folder and drag the entire folder onto your external drive (the drive should show up under the “Devices” section in the Finder sidebar).
Step 2: Delete content in iTunes
You might notice that if you go back into the iTunes program after transferring your iTunes Media folder and try to play a song or video, you will be presented with this message:
This is because iTunes is still looking for these files in their original location on your computer’s hard drive. There are several ways to fix this, but if you have a large library, the best way to do it is to delete all of your content in iTunes and reimport it from your external hard drive. To do this, simply open the iTunes program, navigate to the Music section and then use the select-all command (command+a) to highlighted the entire section. Click delete on your keyboard and confirm the deletion in iTunes.
Remember, this process does not delete the actual files as those are all stored on your external drive. You can think of the content listed in iTunes as shortcuts instead of actual files. Do the same process for Movies, TV Shows and any other categories that you have iTunes content stored in.
Step 3: Reimport the iTunes media files from your external hard drive
The last thing we need to do is reimport your iTunes files from the external hard drive. In the iTunes program, click the “iTunes” option in the desktop toolbar and select “Preferences…”. Select the “Advanced” tab and uncheck the “Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library”. If we do not uncheck this option, when we go to copy the files from your external back into iTunes, iTunes will import those files back onto your computer and they will take up the same amount of hard drive space as before.
Now, open the iTunes Media folder on your external hard drive, go into the Music folder and use the select-all hotkey to select all of the files. Then, simply drag and drop these files into the iTunes Music section. Do this same process for each category of content, dragging and dropping the files into their respective places within the iTunes program.
Voila! You have successfully re-routed your iTunes library from your computer’s local storage to an external hard drive. Now, when you click to play a song within iTunes, it is accessing it via the external hard drive. This means that your hard drive must be plugged-in in order to play content. If you want to keep your files stored on an external hard drive, but still be able to access them in iTunes without having the hard drive plugged in, I highly recommend subscribing to iTunes Match. Find out all about iTunes Match here.
There you have it! If you have any questions or are having trouble transferring your iTunes library to an external drive, leave a comment below or reach out to us on our web chat!
By Malcolm Owen
Monday, March 05, 2018, 10:51 am PT (01:51 pm ET)
Users looking for ways to reduce the amount of things they store on their Mac usually steer clear of doing anything to iTunes and their precious music collection. Even at a time when there are many popular streaming services available to use, deleting these files is not viewed as an option, making iTunes itself an obstacle for salvaging a Mac's drive.
Moving iTunes to an external drive is one compromise, one which still keeps the music available, but off the primary storage drive completely. Though daunting to users, possibly due to the sentimentality associated with music collection, moving an iTunes Library is a relatively simple procedure that is also quite safe to perform.
Before the move
Transferring gigabytes of files between drives can take a considerable amount of time, with that length depending on a number of different variables.
First, make sure to select an external drive with a fast transfer speed, typically one that connects over USB 3.0, USB-C, or Thunderbolt. Using an older technology, such as USB 2.0, can severely prolong the amount of time it takes, purely from its slower transfer rates.
Once you have your selected drive installed, make sure it has enough storage capacity to hold your library, and for future expansion. Right click the desktop icon for the external drive and select Get Info, and make sure the Available listing has enough to cover the library's size.
The size of the iTunes library also dictates the length of the transfer, so it may be worth doing a little pruning beforehand. For example, check your podcasts to see if there are old and listened-to episodes that can be safely deleted.
If you are running iTunes 12.7 or later, there may be an archive of apps that are no longer usable within iTunes, that you may wish to remove. If you do, this AppleInsider guide will tell you how.
While it may be tempting to reuse an external drive already used for Time Machine backups, it is recommended to use a different drive completely. Backups are meant to be separately stored from the data it is duplicating, and keeping some of that data on the same drive as a backup effectively defeats the object of the exercise.
Now would also be a good time to make an up-to-date backup of your Mac before transferring any files.
Moving the library
We first need to collect together all of the content iTunes manages into one folder before making the move. Open iTunes, click File in the Menu Bar, then Library, then Organize Library.
Make sure the Consolidate Files checkbox is ticked, then select OK. Wait for iTunes to complete its consolidation before continuing.
Check the path for the folder within iTunes by going to Preferences within the iTunes Menu bar and selecting Advanced in the new window. The iTunes Media folder location section at the top details where the file collection is located.
Close iTunes, then bring up a Finder window and navigate to the iTunes folder.
If the external drive you wish to move it to is already empty, click and drag the iTunes folder from the Finder window directly onto the icon for the external drive. Alternatively, copy the iTunes folder, navigate
to the place in the external drive you want to use to store iTunes in a separate Finder window, then paste. At this point, the iTunes folder will be copied over to the external storage.
Depending on the bandwidth of the connection, the size of the iTunes folder, and if the Mac or the drive are being accessed by other tasks, this could take a long time to complete. For extremely large collections, or if the Mac needs to be used during the day, it is recommended to wait for a period of time when the Mac is left alone, as it can take multiple hours to move to its new home.
Once the transfer has completed, iTunes needs to be told where to find the files.
Hold the Option key and open iTunes
Storing Itunes Library On External Hard Drive Mac Compatible
. This will bring up a Choose iTunes Library window with three options. Select Choose Library on the far right.In the next window, navigate to the external drive and enter the iTunes folder. Find and select the iTunes Library file, and click Open.
At this point, iTunes will open up from the new location, and will be accessing files from the external storage instead of the Mac's storage. If you are unsure, you can check the path again by going to Preferences in the iTunes Menu Bar, selecting Advanced, and reading the iTunes Media folder location.
If you wish, you can close iTunes and disconnect the external drive. To reuse that iTunes library, you will need to
reconnect the drive to the Mac before opening iTunes again, else it will offer a 'Library cannot be found' error. Saving space
Once the iTunes library is confirmed to be working on the external drive, and possibly backed up too, you now have the option of deleting the initial iTunes library from the Mac to save space. Navigate to the original iTunes folder, and either drag it to the Trash or right-click the folder and select Move to Trash.
To fully reclaim the storage after this, either enter the Trash and select Empty, or