iTunes music in an external disk

Recently someone asked me how to tell iTunes you moved your music to an external Hard Disk. I figure I make a post out of it. Disclaimer; the person that asked for this (and I) have Windows versions of iTunes.


First open the edit from the menu at the top of itunes, and select Preferences. (you can do the same by holding control and pressing ',')

Once you see the preference panel, you may be overwhelmed, by all the options and the many tabs. For our current concerns all we have to look at is the General sub-tab under the Advance tab. There you'll see the one option field that most interest us right now; "iTunes Music folder location". Here's what mine look like.

In the folder location box, I set iTunes to point to the second hard drive installed in my computer (which I use for all my media). To have it point to another location select Change, and give it the new location.
Keep iTunes Music folder organized gives iTunes control of the folder structure inside the directory listed selected above.
Copy files to iTunes... when iTunes finds music in my computer it makes a copy in the directory previously selected , to maintain everything together. (this does create duplicates file in your system if you don't delete the original file) I prefer all music in one location.
The rest of the options are not really important to us, since they don't affect the location of the files.

If you are setting up iTunes for the first time I recommend that you have it place it's music folder in a large hard drive music can add up fast (especially if you have subscriptions to podcast). Once you do this just import your music the usual way.

If you had iTunes setup and full of files already, make the changes mention in this post and then select Add Folder to Library from the File Menu. Point it to the folder you are using and let iTunes reindex your music.