Music on external harddrive, new computer, itunes help

Our old ass Dell computer recently bit the dust (we knew it was coming soon), and I had itunes on it but it was working with all my music being stored on an external hard drive. I remember it was pretty easy to transfer the music and set it up so that any new music went to the new location on the external hard drive.

Well, now we have a new computer that I just installed itunes on and I can't figure out how to get it to use my music folder on my external hd. :chair: I went to the advanced preferences and changed the music folder location to my music folder on the EDD but that didn't seem to do anything. How can I make this work? I have almost 40gigs of music on my EDD and would like to be able to access it with itunes and share it on my home network. Please help! Everything I find online is for macs or for transfering your itunes library to the EDD (which is what I did on the old computer).

Any help would be appreciated. :) I kind of have the feeling that I'm going to have to import all 40gigs into itunes and do all the same steps I did before on the old computer. Seems like there should be an easier way..

I have the same setup for work. All I had to do was connect the drive to the computer (duh) and go to File->Add Folder To Library....-> and select the appropriate folder on the external HDD. Outside of that I don't know?

It should take a while since it'll view all that music as 'new' so it'll download all the album art, etc.

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Originally Posted by oly884

I have the same setup for work. All I had to do was connect the drive to the computer (duh) and go to File->Add Folder To Library....-> and select the appropriate folder on the external HDD. Outside of that I don't know?

It should take a while since it'll view all that music as 'new' so it'll download all the album art, etc.

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Cool, so that just "added" it to the library but didn't install it on the internal hard drive? I'll try that :)

Sweet!!!! Thanks Oly!

That's all I needed to do since I had already changed the media file location. I think it just needed to rebuild all its "routes" to each song and all the info etc... Didn't take too long and then after that I was able to download all the album artwork as well. :) I am a happy camper now :)

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Originally Posted by oly884

I have the same setup for work. All I had to do was connect the drive to the computer (duh)

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This is where you went wrong, isn't it Chris? :flipoff:

Right on! Glad to hear it worked!

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Originally Posted by Robinhood4x4

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Originally Posted by oly884

I have the same setup for work. All I had to do was connect the drive to the computer (duh)

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This is where you went wrong, isn't it Chris? :flipoff:

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Believe me, the thought crossed my mind. :laugh:

Another solution, when you open iTunes, you hold down shift and it will ask you to select your (new) iTunes library location.

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Originally Posted by L33T35T Tacoma

Another solution, when you open iTunes, you hold down shift and it will ask you to select your (new) iTunes library location.

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Changing the library's location wasn't the problem, that was easy. It was because it was a new computer and new itunes, so it didn't have it's info files (which stay on your internal with the itunes) on all the music in the new library. So the library was changed but it basically was acting like nothing was in there because it didn't have the info for it. I just had to add it to the library (even though it was already there) just so that itunes could build its info files.

Strange. Did this reset all your "added to library" dates and song play counts?