Q: I recently bought a large external hard drive to keep my overloaded computer from being slow. I would like to make my iTunes library exist solely on my external hard drive. Is this possible? Every tutorial I have found keeps a copy of the music on the laptop.
Thanks!
– Justine
A: This is definitely possible. Check out our own tutorial on Transferring your iTunes Library, which explains the details on how to do this.
Note that there are two steps to follow: The first moves all of your media content to the external hard drive, and then there’s a separate process to move your iTunes library database and support files over.
The iTunes application program still has to reside on your computer’s internal hard drive, but all of iTunes’ data can easily be located on any drive you like.
The process described in the article above will actually copy your music to the external hard drive rather than moving it, but this simply because iTunes errs on the side of caution when it comes to deleting files. Once you’re sure everything has been moved to the new hard drive successfully, you can clean up the old music tracks yourself to free up space on your computer’s internal hard drive.