Moving my iTunes songs to a bigger drive

October 21, 2004 1:51 PM

PC verson of iTunes: all my mp3 & aac files are on my C drive, which is almost full. I want to lighten the load on that drive by moving all the songs to my E drive, which has much more space. Is there a way to do this without wrecking iTune's database? I don't want to have to re-import everything.
posted by grumblebee to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I've never used iTunes on a PC, but on the Mac there's an "Advanced" tab in Preferences that lets you set the location of the iTunes Music folder. I was in your situation a year ago, and all I had to do was move the folder from one drive to the other and then use the prefs to tell iTunes where its new home was.
posted by Mars Saxman at 2:13 PM on October 21, 2004

What you need to do is change the "iTunes Music folder location" as Mars suggests, to point to a folder on the new drive. Edit > Perferences > Advanced. Then you should choose Advanced > Consolidate Library to copy your music files to the new drive. Afterward you can delete them from the C: drive.
posted by kindall at 2:57 PM on October 21, 2004

You can export the library into an XML file and then simply do a find and replace for all instances of 'C:' to 'E:'. S'what I did when moving everything onto a network drive.
posted by humuhumu at 3:14 PM on October 21, 2004

I admit I haven't tried this, but would copying your My Music or My iTunes Music folders to E:, then deleting them and replacing them with shortcuts work?
posted by arto at 6:54 PM on October 21, 2004

Kindall's advice is 100% correct.
posted by ascullion at 12:27 AM on October 22, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, all. I managed to free up 30GB on my C drive based on your advice!
posted by grumblebee at 6:24 AM on October 22, 2004