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How Do I Get the iTunes On My iMac To Play the Media On My External Drive?

I have all of my media on my external Seagate drive. I can’t get iTunes on my iMac to “see” the media. I’ve tried to redirect iTunes to the drive but I can’t make it play the music, movies or tv shows. It used to work but I screwed it up some way. I didn’t sign up for Music or anything.
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Tom Brandon

Comments: 7 Responses to “How Do I Get the iTunes On My iMac To Play the Media On My External Drive?”

    5 years ago

    The way you would do it is to drag-and-drop the folders/files into iTunes. This adds them to your library. Normally, it would copy them to your internal drive too, or wherever your iTunes library is located. But if you go to iTunes, Preferences, Advanced and uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to the library" it will just link to the files in place.

    Once you have the files in iTunes, you can just play them in iTunes as normal.

    Tom Brandon
    5 years ago

    Could you please be more specific about moving the folder/files part? Exactly what folder & files and where do you put them? Sorry but I'm confused.

    5 years ago

    Tom: You would first change that iTunes preference I mentioned. Then, drag and drop any audio file, or a folder full of audio files. Drag them from the Finder into iTunes. So, in iTunes you would be looking at Music, and your Library. You'd see whatever songs you have in there already. Drag the files/folders right into the middle of iTunes. Try it with one song and you'll see. Then once you get it, you can do multiple songs or folders full of them.

    Tom Brandon
    5 years ago

    Thank you so much Gary. Everything seems to be back to normal and working ok. It was incredibly easy, just like you said. Gracias!

    John Schina
    5 years ago

    I have my iTunes library on an external drive. what will need to happen to the music before upgrading to Catalina?

    5 years ago

    John: It doesn't appear that you need to do anything. Music should work just like the iTunes app in this respect.

    John Schina
    5 years ago

    wow! that's great news. for some reason i thought from what I read regarding the changes that I would be out of luck.

    thanks for your assistance.

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