How To Split Your iTunes Library Across Multiple Locations
It's a fact: as your iTunes collection gets bigger, the amount of free space on your drive gets smaller. Sure, you could stuff your computer's internal drive to the gills with as much media as you can jam in there, but as Macs require a reasonable chunk of drive real estate to keep on puttering along in a trouble-free fashion, we'd advise against this storage strategy. What to do?
You could buy a larger internal drive for a little more breathing room. Or, you could bite a bullet and delete a few thousand files from your enormous collection of music, movies and television shows, but that's a pretty extreme fix. If neither of these solutions appeal to you, how about transferring part of your iTunes library to a spare external drive that you've got laying around? Yeah, that's the ticket! Here's how to do it.
1: You Gotta Keep 'Em Separated
The first order of business is deciding where your files will reside. For this tutorial, we've opted to leave our audio files on one drive and move all of the video files in our library to a new location -- in this case, an external drive.
A word to the wise: you've no doubt invested a lot of time and money into your iTunes library, and will want to ensure its safety. While you might have had a backup plan for the files residing on your Mac's internal drive, computer users often neglect to backup the information they keep on their external drives. Given Apple's current policy to only allow an item to be downloaded from the iTunes Music Store once, be sure that you have a contingency plan for your data before proceeding any further with this tutorial.
2: Give them a Home
Create a folder on the new external drive, and title it something clever like iTunes or iTunes Video. This will help you keep things organized should you ever decide to use the drive for anything other than storing your video files. Then, drag your Television and Movies folders to the new location. At this point, the file transfer should begin.
If you have a large library like we do, you might want to go make a sandwich -- this is going to take a while.
3: Do a Little Spring Cleaning
When OS X moves files on to an external drive, it is not a true transfer, but rather a duplication of those files. That means that while your movie and video files now reside on an external drive, they're also still kicking back in their original locationm too. To remedy this, open iTunes, and navigate to the Movies pane of your library. Select all of the files in the movie display and delete them.
iTunes will ask you if you want to keep the original files on your hard drive or move them to the Trash. You're going to want to Trash those files. Doing so will remove all of the original files from your hard drive and free up a whole lot of space. Repeat this step with your television shows and any other iTunes files you've elected to move to your new external location.
4: Jedi Drive Tricks
It's time to get those files on your external drive back into iTunes. Select the folders you transferred to your external drive and then, holding down the option key on your keyboard, drag them into iTunes. By holding down the option key as you add the files, you're ordering iTunes to create a link to them, instead of copying them to your computer's designated iTunes folder like it normally does.
There you have it: an iTunes library that spans multiple locations. For more Apple tricks and tips, be sure to check back with us as often as humanly possible!
Follow this article's author, Seamus Bellamy on Twitter
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damac
February 26, 2012 at 6:25am
Good Tutorial. I am facing just the problem, that I cannot add new files to the library, so that it automatically copies them to external drive: ""Attempting to copy to the disk...". Is the reason, that it is an (mounted/unlocked) encrypted HFS+drive or do you have the same problems?
dwieder
July 01, 2011 at 11:41am
I separated my videos to an external hard drive. Now when I add new videos, it creates a new TV Shows folder on the internal drive, thereby creating two spots for my iTunes videos. I suppose I need to manually manage this and move new videos to the external hard drive if I want to keep it all together, correct?
lairdo
May 09, 2011 at 6:33am
I believe there is one more gotcha to this tip regarding TV shows. I have found when I import TV shows I have ripped, they always are logged as Movies. I have had to reimport a few shows and even if they were tagged correctly in iTunes, they lose the designation between TV shows and Movies when this happens. Changing them to TV shows is easy in the Get Info->Options windows (Media Kind).
I recommend to reimport the TV shows first. Then select all of them in mass and make set their media to TV shows. iTunes will let you make this bulk change without impacting anything else. Then reimport the Movies.
(If you import the movies first, you have to pick out the TV shows from the movies. Not impossible to do, but a pain if you have a lot of them.)
Hopefully Apple will add this sort of functionality eventually to iTunes. I finally moved my 1.4 TB library to a Drobo after my 3rd drive replacement for more space.
limebaish
March 24, 2011 at 9:35pm
Fantastic little trick this. Just wondering if I would still be able to have iTunes organise my files for me? I know I'd have to put them on the right drive but after that could they be moved etc.
Also, do I need to untick the boxes in preferences (copy to/keep organised) before trying this?
Thanks very much :)
Aligirl
March 13, 2011 at 9:35pm
When I tried holding option key down while dragging my movies from new location - they just copied again, taking up all of my newly freed up space. What did I do wrong?
da2357
March 09, 2011 at 9:47am
Another way to resolve this problem is:
- quit iTunes if it's running
- within the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder
- copy the Movies and TV Shows folders to the external drive
- from a Finder window, delete the original Movies and TV Shows folders
- launch Terminal and run the following two commands, substituting your user/account (short) name for "username" below... and substituting the name of your external hard drive for "itunes_hd".ln -s "/Volumes/itunes_hd/Movies" "/Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies"
ln -s "/Volumes/itunes_hd/TV Shows" "/Users/username/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/TV Shows"This will create symbolic links to the Movies and TV Shows folders on your external drive. NOW, WITH ALL THAT SAID, I'm not comfortable doing that with an external hard drive because I don't know what iTunes will think if the external drive isn't connected. I think splitting the iTunes library in this or any manner should be considered a "band-aid" approach only until you can purchase and install a larger hard drive.
drfrot
March 09, 2011 at 3:17am
Hmmm, I'm not sure I'd recommend this. What happens the next time you rip something? You can only specify one location for your iTunes media folder in the settings. Doesn't splitting it in two manually more or less guarantee confusion further down the line?
kwaxuyeoma
March 09, 2011 at 9:50am
Not necessarily. If you regularly consolidate your library(s) and their location(s) the confusion is minimal to nonexistent. After a while you will be managing your computer's itunes media folder as though it were like a mobile device, and your external consolidated library like depository. While there are no applications that can do all of this for you at the moment, nor is this function built into itunes. In the end you'll have to rely on your own file management acrobatics to keep things copacetic.
mdg88
March 08, 2011 at 9:07pm
Instead of separating out videos, I want to move part of my music library to an external drive and keep albums/playlists intact. Is there any way to do this?
kwaxuyeoma
March 08, 2011 at 11:52pm
You might try copying the tracks in your playlist to a new folder on your desktop. Then import those tracks as a new album. iTunes will create a new folder the music section of your iTunes media folder, provided that you edit the track info on the newly imported tracks. iTunes will usually group tracks if they share some of the same info. As a rule of thumb I leave the album artist field blank and then add a clever album title to all those tracks in said playlist. Next is specifying that this new album is a compilation, by checking compilation checkbox. This keeps the artist info per track intact and does not force a static name to the rest of the tracks. This playlist will now reside in itunes media/music/compilations folder, and leave the original files in their respective album folders too. After that you can add custom artwork to your new playlist album. Essentially you are pretending that your playlist came from a ripped cd. If you follow my previous post you can remove any combination of folders from the itunes media folder from your computer, and then turn to your external drive to fill the rest of your media needs. If ever you try to play something you removed the media folder on your computer without your external connected, itunes will prompt you to relocate that media. Do not relocate media. Instead quit iTunes and relaunch with the external connected to avoid relocation frustration.
41DMBfan
March 08, 2011 at 5:56pm
Perhaps the only bummer about splitting your library this way, is having your play counts reset. iTunes views the new, referenced imports as if they were brand new items in your library. Other than that, it sure works peachy-keen!
kwaxuyeoma
March 08, 2011 at 3:11pm
What I've done is I performed a migration from the itunes preferences menu. After that i deleted the movies from the iTunes media folder on my computer. Now, when I launch iTunes the remaing media on my computer will still function as normal, even without the external connected. When i want to play movies all I have to do is relaunch iTunes with the external connected. An added benefit is when I add new media without the external connected, all i have to do is run consolidate library from the file menu with the external connected to keep everything in sync.
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