The situation is that my daughter has about 20 megabytes left on her 60 Gig hard drive. We want to move her itunes music to an external hard drive that we have. I searched this site, and found an excellent article put out by Apple that describes exactly how to do that. I don’t want to mess anything up so I have the following question:
When I open itues it says it is about 25 gigs in size but when I go to program folders, itunes, the file labled “music” has about 14 gigs. Are there 11 gigs of mystery music out there someplace, or does the 25 gigs at the bottom of itunes include the program itself, which I notice is pretty large?
One second question: Near the end of the article it says: “Note: Don’t remove the iTunes library files that may be in the same location as the iTunes Music folder.” As best I can tell, there are no library files in the music folder, and it seems that the music library is a windows, rather than iTunes folder, so that I should, after transfering music, be able to delete the music folder without consequences. Does that sound right?
Where are you getting the 25 gigs number? If “Music” is selected under “Library” in the left menu, that number is only going to tell you how much music is in the library, and not movies or TV shows or podcasts or anything like that (if she has anything like that). But that would mean the folder contents should be BIGGER than the number, not smaller (I just checked…I have about 20 gigs of music in my library, but I have 43 gigs in the folder…movies and TV shows and video podcasts).
Perhaps she has added things to the library that weren’t copied to the iTunes folder? I’m unaware of an easy way to check this. You could scan the iTunes Music folder for an artist she knows exists in the library until you find one that’s not in the folder, then right-click and select “Get Info” on that song to see where it’s physically located on the hard drive. If it’s someplace else, there’s your explanation.
If you just want to assume this is what happened, I think if you click “Consolidate Library” under the advanced tab, iTunes will copy any music that’s not already in the iTunes folder to the iTunes folder.
I always check out www.ilounge.com for iPod and iTunes questions like this…they have an amazing depth of knowledge about these things.
I’ve done that any number of times because my current setup only has a single connection to either 1) rip CDs to the LaCie hard drive or 2) update my iPod.
It can be time consuming, but it doesn’t require much action on your part. You’ll probably realize this, but if you unplug the outboard hard drive and then import new media, preferences will reset the location (for the newly imported media only) to the inboard hard drive. So it’s important to keep connected or you’ll be resetting the preferences for your music folder more than once.