Move the iTunes Library
Moving your iTunes music library to another machine is really easy to do since Apple has made iTunes store all of your music in one central location. Unless you have changed it yourself to something else, iTunes music is by default stored in your home directory at ~/Music/iTunes/
Moving your iTunes Music Library
Using this method you can move your entire iTunes Music library to anywhere, including an external hard drive.
* The first thing you’ll want to do is locate your iTunes music library, as mentioned earlier this is located in your home directories Music folder, at ~/Music/iTunes
* Next, copy that entire ~/Music/iTunes folder to the new desired location. This may take a while depending on how large your music library is.
* Launch iTunes, enter the Preferences by going through the iTunes menu and selecting ‘Preferences’
* Click the ‘Advanced’ tab and you’ll see the location of your iTunes music library like the screenshot below. Click the ‘Change’ button and navigate to the new iTunes music library location (where you copied the ~/Music/iTunes/ folder too)
* Now click ‘OK’ and your iTunes library is set to it’s new location!
How do you move the iTunes library to a new Mac so that it is the main machine for my iPod/iPhone?
The iTunes music directory stores all of your iPhone/iPod ownership data, so moving this directory also moves ownership in that sense. This is achieved in practically the exact same way as the method above, you just need to connect the two Mac’s together either through a network or through something like firewire target disk mode (obviously this only works on Mac’s with firewire support). If you’re lucky enough to have both of your Mac’s with Firewire support, then hook a firewire cable between the two, and reboot one of them holding down T to place it into Target Disk Mode. When the machine boots it will act as an external hard disk on the other Mac, so you can easily and very quickly copy the contents of your ~/Music/ folder to the desired location.
Note that the above methods work all more or less the same with Windows PC’s as well, except that the Music/iTunes directory is usually located in ‘My Documents’ but you can transfer it to a Mac (or vice versa) or PC just the same.
I’m afraid I munged up my iTunes database a few moves ago. Currently, my library is split between the local machine and a NAS drive. I’ve copied everything locally using rsync, but there are still a few hundred files whose location is listed on the external drive. I’ve tried manually updating the iTunes Library.xml and iTunes Music Library.xml files, without success. Is there a quicker solution than just taking the external drive off-line and finding each “missing” track individually?
[...] we hadn’t covered this here before in the context of a PC to Mac switch. If you just want to move your iTunes library to another location on your Mac it’s a pretty similar [...]
[...] we hadn’t covered this here before in the context of a PC to Mac switch. If you just want to move your iTunes library to another location on your Mac it’s a pretty similar [...]
[...] we hadn’t covered this here before in the context of a PC to Mac switch. If you just want to move your iTunes library to another location on your Mac it’s a pretty similar [...]
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I have been using an external hard drive as the home location for my iTunes folder for about 9 months now. I was running Leopard on my old laptop, but just upgraded to a new machine and Lion. I just tried getting iTunes set up with my external hard drive as the default library location, but it is not working. Is there something new I need to make sure and do to be compatible with iTunes 10.4 and Lion? I am really hoping to resolve this soon. Thanks.
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