[plasmatico]

Hi again - New to Mac so please bare with me. I had iTunes on my Windows laptop, and all my music was imported to an external hard drive (My Book). Now on the iMac I want iTunes to recognize my music library on the external drive and it doesn't.

This is what I've done so far:

iTunes > Preferences > Advanced -> Changed the music folder location to the external HD music folder (My Book: My iTunes).

I tried to import the iTunes Library.itl but I get an error message: "The file "iTunes Library.itl" cannot be imported because it does not appear to be a valid exported file.

I called Apple support but the rep kept asking me to copy the music files to the iMac HD, but I want to keep my media file son the external drive. So that did not helped at all.

Now, here is the odd thing, when I go directly to My Book > My iTunes > Music Album, and I choose all the songs on a particular Album (so that all the songs are highlighted) and double click, all the songs and album cover appear on iTunes and starts playing.

Question is: is there a more efficient method, or would I have to go to each and every album (500+) and do the above walkthrough?

TIA.

[ghporter]

It's a multi-step process to move everything to your external drive and get iTunes to see it. First, copy your entire iTunes folder to your external drive. Next (this is the somewhat scary part) delete your entire iTunes library-all of it! Dump every single entry. Now (this is the tedious part) with the option to "copy new songs to the iTunes folder" UNSELECTED, add all the songs in your external drive's iTunes folder to iTunes. You can do it in pretty much one fell swoop, but it takes a long time for it to do its thing.

When you're done with this and only AFTER you've ensured that everything is working fine, you can empty the iTunes music folder on your computer.

[plasmatico]

Thank you for your reply. Just to clarify, my music is already (and its always been) in the external drive, this is how I was using it when I had my iTunes/Win machine. Now I want iTunes on the new iMac to "see" my music.

What I don't understand is why when I double click on a song the song automatically appears on iTunes, downloads the album cover and starts playing. When I check Info, the song is on the external drive and music folder I told iTunes it was in. I have my entire music library in the external drive and don't want to make it a manual process as it would take me forever to complete.

P.S. I had this problem before when I was using the Win machine I had and it was solved by choosing Import the iTunes Library.itl. In this case I get an error message as explained on my first post.

[Hal Itosis]

File--> Add to Library...

(check the Help menu)

[ghporter]

You can also drag the songs (or folders) in Finder to the iTunes window (in Library|Music display mode) to add them. It takes a few minutes, not "forever" when you do this-unless you're talking about a HUGE library. My 18+GB of music took about 8 minutes to be read and integrated into my iTunes library from my networked drive, and a lot of that time can be attributed to the speed of my network.