[Euphrates]

I got a new, external hard drive, since I have many, many gigabytes of music and I couldn't hold it all on my laptop. I have found, however, that iTunes won't automatically relocate the mp3 files when I move them to the external hard drive, after deleting the old files. Is there any easy way of doing this without just deleting my entire iTunes library and moving everything back in? My files are scattered throughout the old hard drive, so it would be kind of messy to dig through and find everything to make sure I didn't leave anything behind, it seems like. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance =).

[Millennium]

If they were still on the same drive, then there might be a chance, but moving files across drives breaks all of Apple's mechanisms for uniquely identifying files. The unique ID of a file -the file's real "name", as far as the system is concerned; the names we type in are only there for our own convenience- are only unique to the drive that they're on. When you move them, they are given new unique IDs, to ensure that the IDs they're given don't conflict with any which are already on the drive.

I'm afraid your only option is probably to delete everything in the Library (including normal playlists, probably, but not Smart Playlists) and re-import everything. When you do this, be sure to tell iTunes not to organize your files for you, so that it won't just copy them back to your hard drive.

This said, you should be able to just drag the whole folder into iTunes, and it will find all of the files anywhere in it; you don't need to import them one at a time or even one folder at a time.

[cpac]

Originally posted by Euphrates:
Any suggestions?

The best/easiest way to move iTunes songs from your hard drive to an external drive without breaking the file links is to:

Set a new location on the external HD as the iTunes Music Folder (in iTunes Preferences)
Choose "Consolidate Library" from the menu

This will copy everything to the external drive, and link the library to those files, leaving you free to delete the files on your internal hard drive.

This may not work if you've already deleted all the "old" files on your internal hard drive however in which case you will probably just need to delete your library and re-import all your music files.

[Euphrates]

okay thanks guys. Seems like I have several options, all of them equally unappealing =). Is there a way to get iTunes to search for all mp3 files, like it does when you first install it? Then maybe all I would need to replace would be my playlists?